


Joker Over Knave

by PresquePommes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: A Gradual Shift From Silliness To Seriousness, Anal Play, Biting, Brutalizing Emotional Whiplash, Consensual Kink, Dirty Talk, Factory Reset Universe, Frottage, Hair-pulling, Light Bondage, M/M, Marijuana, Masturbation, Oral Sex, Post-Sburb, Prank Wars, Product Testing, Stand-Up Comedy, With Persistent Silliness Throughout
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-06
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-13 17:21:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 26
Words: 58,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/505898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PresquePommes/pseuds/PresquePommes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You know that you and Egbert have radically different concepts of what, precisely, constitutes a prank.</p><p>This does not discourage you in the slightest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> BroJohn doesn't get enough love and Blue Thallium doesn't update often enough to appease the aching need in my soul.
> 
> Also, somebody needed to exploit John's Alpha profession as a comedian.
> 
> This shit's brutally short, sorry. Next chapter should be longer.

He heralds his first visit to the Strider-apartment-sans-Dave with what you assume is supposed to be a rendition of the bucket-of-water-on-the- door-left-ajar trick.

Except that the bucket is a box and the box is full of smuppets and the smuppets are packed in the box so tightly that had you, in fact, been born a complete moron, there’s a good chance that the prank still would have failed miserably.

As it is, you lift that box from the doorframe with one hand and open that door with the other like you’re posing for the cover of you-fucking-suck-at-this-Egbert magazine, featuring Bro Strider as the smug-ass prank Houdini centrefold.

And then he fucking pies you.

With an actual pie.

Right in the shades.

Everything tastes and smells like meringue. You see meringue. You hear meringue. Your world is fucking meringue synesthesia, a cornucopia of nauseating sweetness cut with far too little lemon doing flawless backstroke in an off-white haze of meringue and you start to feel like you _are_ meringue.

He tells you that Dave took a moment out of his busy schedule of playing tonsil hockey with Harley and skipping classes to ask him to check up on you.

You whip the smuppet box at him in heartfelt gratitude.

You never miss.

==>

The second time he visits, he covers your toilet with plastic wrap and fills your shower head with Rock-a-Dile Red Kool-Aid powder. Your hair is pink for days, but you smell fantastic.

==>

The third time he visit, he opens the door to a broad semi-circle of carefully placed smuppets with the vibrate mode on.

You’ve fitted some of them with internal speakers scavenged from a half dozen Tickle-Me-Elmo dolls.

He backs away slowly, but not before you notice that he’s holding a tube of toothpaste and a bag of icing sugar.

You puzzle over what he planned to do with them.

You never find out.

==>

The fourth time he visits, he just cracks open the door to lob a water balloon full of grape jello at you before absconding down the hall and you think that’s a pretty lame prank, honestly.

Only then does it occur to you to wonder why the fuck he has a key to your apartment.

==>

The Littlest Strider informs you that not only did he not give his bucktoothed sidekick a key to your home, he also did not instruct him to check up on you, and the whole affair becomes highly suspicious.

Your suspicions are both assuaged and confirmed when you discover that Egbert has a fledgling career as a stand-up comedian and that he is in Houston- another oddity that you failed spectacularly to give a shit about until this very moment- because he’s struck up a particularly successful relationship with the owner of a small but relatively central venue.

The clientele is fairly adult.

The source of his most successful material is, apparently, you.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's not significantly longer, but I wanted to update quickly and life keeps asking me not to be a fanfiction-writing hermit. (But _Mooom_ , etc., except by Mom I mean University.)
> 
> This will involve more than just zany hijinks, I promise.
> 
> It will probably never not involve zany hijinks, but it will involve more.

Egbert has a small and cult-like internet following.

After finding a handful of videos- mostly taken with phone cameras, nothing professional, not yet- you can’t really say you’re surprised.

It’s his delivery.

Well, it’s not delivery, but… it _is_ his delivery.

He’s mastered the art of the brazen non-sequitur. He sometimes interrupts his own stories with the most unexpected and absurd comments and behaves as though they’re totally related thoughts, and then, just when you start to really wonder, he smiles.

No, that’s not right.

He _grins_ , just grins, all shiny dumbass front teeth like the last two white Chiclets from last year’s Halloween candy, just stands there with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders raised around his ears like a small child who knows that he’s just gotten away with something he really shouldn’t have, and it gets you every fucking time.

He sure as hell doesn’t carry any irony cred, but his diction regresses to elementary school levels whenever genitals are involved, and the sight of the Martha Stewart cookbook- _Martha’s American Food: A Celebration of Our Nation’s Most Treasured Dishes, From Coast To Coast_ , hardcover, of course, it had to be hardcover- you keep nestled between the blender and the microwave makes you think _weenie_ and you can _hear him saying it, whispering suddenly like it’s the dirtiest goddamn word in the world_ and you squat on the kitchen floor with your head between your knees and just fucking _shake_.

You’re damn certain it’s ironic of you to find him so funny, and that’s good enough for you.

==>

You come home one day to a cake on your stovetop, and think _oh shit, this just got real_ , because it’s one of those lacy-looking three-tiered fondant-laden white and pink wedding monstrosities, complete with plastic bride and groom.

And you’re really not stupid enough to step on the tripwire stretched taut across the bottom of the doorway, but even as you step over it, you see a red light go on and realize that Egbert has finally caught wise to the usefulness of motion detection.

And then the cake explodes and covers you in chunks of sodden pastry- and of course it’s red velvet, super classy, Dickbert, you’re swooning - and very sticky off-white goop. If you weren’t wholly familiar with the exact texture he was going for, you may not have known the difference.

The bride and groom appear to be stuck to your ceiling. You leave them there.

You’re begrudgingly impressed by the bukkake cake.

Belatedly, you wish you had this on film.

==>

You settle into a seat slightly to the left of the stage and sit with your legs spread wide and your duffel bag between them. Your hat stayed home.

No need to tempt the fates.

It’s bright enough onstage that he can’t see you, but when he starts talking about your “weird dumb anime shades” for the benefit of the newcomers, making little triangles in the air with his fingers, the girl beside you does a double-take.

You lift your index finger to your lips.

“-and not only are they vibrating across the carpet, some of them are _laughing_ ,” he says, voice dropping conspiratorially like the smuppets will hear him.

You unzip the bag.

You can see the girl beside you staring out of the corner of your eye.

No matter.

"-just this army of furry _butts_ and _weiners_ vibrating across the floor at me, laughing-"

Despite its bulk, it only takes you seconds to shift the wide barrel and grip it between your knees, but the instant you have it there, you release the propellant.

The moment that first intrepid Cheeto hits him, you know he knows it’s you, because he turns, incredulous and squinting, just in time for the full onslaught.

You abscond.

You’ve never regretted anything less.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the rating hikes because the author is a giant dirtbag.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a huge dirtbag. New rating, new tags. Especially filthy content.
> 
> Whoops. (This was my first time writing smut of any kind. I'm so sorry. Be gentle with me.)

You wake up feeling smug, but you’re not particularly sure why.

There’s some reason other than the obvious, the obvious being: You’re you. Being you is reason enough to wake up in a haze of self-satisfaction.

But there’s something different today. Some lingering malicious glee.

It’s evading you. Goddamn are you ever getting old.

Did you get laid? Maybe you got laid.

You grope blindly for your phone.

The screen blazes into life and when it stops being blinding, it helpfully notifies you that traffic to your webpage has tripled overnight and you’re suddenly very awake and _oh,_ now you remember.

Almost as good as getting laid.

==>

As it turns out, someone in the first row was filming with a small handheld on a portable stand and the video went viral overnight.

It’s crystal clear in a way that you can appreciate, especially in the inevitable slow-motion repeat and reverse versions with inappropriate music, because you can see that little puff of Cheeto dust as it hits his cheek and the streak of orange it leaves behind.

You and your Cheeto cannon seem to have kickstarted Egbert’s career singlehandedly. Apparently his fans had thought he was just particularly imaginative.

With your appearance, they seem to like him all the more for his apparent honesty.

Unfortunately, with this revelation, you discover something less generically heartwarming and a lot more indicative of why your server exceeded capacity and crashed around noon.

Double-take girl with the grapefruit tits was apparently also fondling her phone camera a bit too intimately, because there’s a picture of you, and that’s gone viral, too.

Normally, you’d just lie low and wait for the hype to pass, but this time, you’re not sure it will.

She got you with the cannon between your knees, one hand on the release pin and the other steadying the barrel, and one look at the picture tells you that you were totally tense with excitement because you can see every muscle in your chest and abdomen right through your fucking shirt and too many fucking girls on the internet think you’re the hottest shit ever but you legitimately just look like you’re about to drop a huge steamer and _you’re grinning like the fucking devil._

You don’t remember smiling.

Apparently, you were smiling.

You’re not entirely certain how you feel about this revelation.

==>

You’re supremely glad that you chose a P.O. Box as your return address on your website.

You did it keep Dave safe from any overeager customers. You never thought you’d be grateful for it on a personal level.

However, your careful trawling informs you that several forums have apparently delegated a handful of Houston locals to _“hunt down Cheeto guy and find out what a freak in bed he is, go go go go!”_

Yesterday, you would have said that sounded fucking wicked, man, being absolutely covered in bitches is your life goal, and you would’ve been a little bit sincere.

Today, you’re just creeped out, because you’re pretty damn sure that most of these girls- and dudes, you guess, you can never tell on the internet- are younger than Dave, and seriously, _what the fuck_.

You have a significant number of very small new orders that you find very suspicious.

You post a notice informing your customers of planned downtime, casually eyeball the contents of the mini fridge in your room, and decide to stay home for a while.

No problem.

==>

Big problem.

You’re going stir-crazy.

It’s been six hours and you failed to take into account that no sparring partner and no need for new videos or product promotion means that you have exactly jack shit to do.

There’s only so much time you can spend intentionally glitching Tony Hawk before even that loses its lustre.

You don’t exactly practice T’ai Chi. You’re not going to go up to the roof to gather your chakras or get your zen on or some shit, not unless your life suddenly becomes the greatest of the terrible animes by virtue of you and you can shoot spirit energy from you goddamn fingertips.

You’re losing your mind.

You’re not twenty-one anymore. It’s not even like you could just spend the next week jerking your meat all day.

And then you realize that you could.

Maybe not all day. But right now, sure. You’re a bit of a sucker for instant gratification.

You’ve had some complaints about the noise level of the vibrators in some of the smuppet models, and you have a shiny new box of product that needs testing.

You can still be productive. Hell, this could lend some legitimacy to your hiatus.

==>

You lie on your back and pull out a necktie for the only thing you’ve actually ever used them for, which is tying one knee up to the headboard because let’s face it, it’s not like it’s the first time you’ve done this, there’s no way you wouldn’t have a preferred position for product testing by now and you only have so many hands.

So up one leg goes, and out goes the other, and _goddamn_ , why is your lube still cold when the rest of the apartment- hell, the rest of the city- is a few hundred square miles of sauna? They could use this shit to treat heatstroke victims.

You don’t really need to tease yourself open, not anymore, but you do anyway, because it feels good and it’s not like you have anywhere to fucking be, anyway.

You tell yourself that, at least, but you’re a bit overeager about palming the head of your cock and you end up slipping a finger in before you really mean to, but oh well, too late now, may as well roll with it, if anyone asks, you were chiller than Alaska.

You focus just on stretching yourself, and you’ve done it so many times before that it’s almost cathartic, like it’s just an exercise, like the word implies, and then you start slipping in the slick head of the vibrator and _okay_ , _that feels good_.

It’s not too broad but it’s a little bit curved in the best way, because you need it to curve for the nose and you need it to press against the prostate- that’s sort of the fucking point- and press against the prostate it certainly does.

You start the vibrations low and groan around the belt you’re clenching between your teeth.

It occurs to you that you probably don’t need it, with Dave gone- you can be as loud as you want, which isn’t very, anyway- but it gives you something to do with your mouth, so you don’t bother with spitting it out.

Instead, you up the intensity on the toy and roll it under your fingers, reveling in the changing level of contact.

You’re not sure when you started to stroke yourself. Damn, you’re antsy today.

Your breath is starting to come a bit short, a bit fast, _more than bit fast, shit, shit,_ when you hear someone shuffling in the next room and think _fuck, not now, Egbert, not now_ , _not right fucking now,_ but despite the lock on your door, you’re legitimately afraid of getting caught and that’s weirdly exciting and you’re starting to have trouble thinking straight.

 The vibrator is nearly silent. On some very distant level that means nothing to you right now, you approve.

John is not. You have a thought that you promptly beat into a bloody pulp because _no._

You’re so close to coming that you’re twitching, you’re legitimately twitching, and _fuck, it hurts_.

A hand rattles the doorknob to your room and your adrenaline spikes and your muscles seize and the vibrator pushes particularly firmly against that sweet spot and _fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck you’re pretty sure you’re making some sort of terrible sound and he can hear you but you literally can’t even see right now, holy shit, fuck,_ your brain is melting out of your ears and you think you just bit a hole in the leather of your belt and your leg is going numb and you _don’t give a fuck, holy shit_.

You fumble the vibrator out and turn it off because now that it’s stopped feeling good, it’s starting to make you weirdly numb and uncomfortable.

Another thing that’s uncomfortable is the complete silence outside of your door.

You undo the tie above your knee carefully, using what little focus you have left to lower your leg at a slower pace than little-kid-thrown-onto-the-trampoline and you hear the front door close and let out a sigh you hadn’t even realized you’d been holding in.

You wipe yourself absently with your boxers and are distantly glad that you’re too foggy with orgasm to really be concerned about what just happened, but you should really make sure he didn’t do anything too fucking weird to your apartment because he has a reason to that you can’t quite recall right now, you should really get up, you really should-

You dream of horses.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the author almost doubles word-count and confuses Joker Over Knave's readership endlessly, re: Bro's voice. (I'm so sorry.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Infinitely less zany, but I'm sure you can see where the zaniness shift is going to.
> 
> And, might I say: pedantic weenie. The update solidified my confidence in John's characterization a lot. (Still not as happy with it as I am with Bro's, though. Tell me if anything strikes you as off.)
> 
> Might I say again: I have the best reviewers in the history of paradox space. You guys are wonderful and I love you.

He did something weird to your apartment.

As expected, Egbert parried your generous gift with one of his own, as sincere and grateful as you had been the first time he treated you to his baking skills.

Unfortunately, you seem to have missed your window of enjoyment for the gift in question, because in the ten or so hours you managed to avoid leaving your bed- probably a new record for you, considering the number of times you’ve actually slept in it rather than on the futon- Egbert apparently gave into impatience and triggered his own trap before you could.

You admire the new decor in your living room- your real room, really- because feathers are pretty cool, and you’re fascinated to see if Vaseline is as good a substitute for the tar in tar-and-feathering for people as it appears to be for your floor, walls, bed, xBox, television and turntables- your posters and smuppets are somewhat improved by the appearance of avian plushness, however, and you consider the possibility of producing feathered smuppet models- and you hope it is, because you’re pretty sure a lot of this shit is ruined.

You’ll probably get an answer soon enough.

There’s a noticeable gap in the feathering near the door, and you can guess why.

==>

Contrary to what you’d thought, you don’t see Egbert for the rest of the day or the day after, and without an xBox- you left the tray open and that shit is firmly wrecked, damn- or anything to do online but browse websites you’ve already memorized- your computer is, thankfully, as resistant to petroleum jelly as it is to any other dubious substance you’ve exposed it to, and your screen and keyboard are just a little greasier for the encounter- you do something you generally avoid doing.

You pull out one of your old projects.

You all but gave up on applied robotics when Dave made his grand entrance. You’d known he was coming, somehow- you were already prepared for the little man’s squinty little red eyes and attitude problems- and you pragmatically chose the option that afforded you more stability and better income.

Robotics pays big when it pays at all. Niche porn pays big, and it always pays.

It had never felt like a significant choice.

You honestly never expected to get this old.

Somehow, you always expected something to happen. Something big. Something dangerous. Something you might not live through.

You taught Dave to stockpile his own food and live on and out of milk crates and cinder blocks because you always knew, somewhere in the back of your mind, that there was no point in getting attached to nice things like bedframes and perishable food.

You peppered him with harmless smuppet ambushes so he’d always be aware of his surroundings, pushed him hard so he’d never be helpless, and always made him work for what he wanted so he’d never take handouts and never owe anything to anyone, because indebtedness puts people in danger for people they don’t even like, and if a Strider’s going to fight for someone, it had better be someone he does.

And maybe sometimes you gave in and spoiled him a bit, getting him his own set of tables and an iPhone and a fancy camera with a complete set of lenses that all looked the same to you- he tried to explain their different uses to you but you only ever take stills in the same lighting and you’re more a video man, yourself, and eventually he just gave up- but you were always afraid- have always been afraid- that he didn’t realize that you would die for him without hesitation.

You look at the heap of colourful wiring and green circuit boards in the box in front of you and think that the louder your knees pop in the morning- or afternoon, whatever- the more sentimental you seem to get.

And then you think _but something big never came_ without really wanting to and you feel lost and that’s why you don’t like thinking about this, because you always thought that midlife crises were supposed to happen gradually, that you were supposed to look back on them after and say you say them coming, but you remember the exact moment that you knew that everything you’d ever known with absolute gut certainty was wrong, because one day, you woke up in the Twilight Zone and never left.

On that day, Dave- sixteen years old and just the kind of gangly you remember being at his age and an increasingly zealous follower of the church of Fuck You, Bro- walked into the living room and hugged you without warning or explanation.

He just stood there with his arms around you and his head against your chest and his shades digging into your sternum and he was quiet but you knew he was crying and you didn’t know why and you didn’t know how to ask so you just wrapped your arms around his shoulders awkwardly and held him like he was about to break.

Neither of you ever brought it up again, but Dave never went back to normal and sometimes you’d catch him staring at you like he couldn’t believe you existed and he never stopped doing that, not for the next four years, not until he moved out to go to New York for school and to schmooze with Harley, gun-toting girl wonder.

She sounds pretty rad. You still haven’t met her, but you hope she can make him a little bit of a kid again, because sometimes when you look at him you see an old man in a kid’s body and it scares you because it’s not any kind of wound you can take for him and you’re _helpless_ and that’s the only thing in the world you can’t stand being.

 And in moments like that, you look at him and suddenly realize just how much time you have left, because somehow, impossibly, the world isn’t ending and you’re going to live in this apartment until you don’t, not until it crumbles under your feet.

When Dave turned seventeen, you started playing with wiring and welding again because your life plan suddenly included fifty-odd years you seem to have unwittingly won at the lifespan lottery- even now, you still don’t feel like you always had them and just never knew that they were there.

You feel like you were going to die.

And then, somehow, you didn’t.

So when Dave turned eighteen, you thought maybe you’d try your hand at creating artificial intelligence, and you filled all of the pages of your Rainbow Dash notepad with rough sketches and hard scribbles about the similarities between neurological activity patterns and learning program sequencing and one day just after he turned nineteen you finally ran out of room and looked down at the last page and it was a bittersweet mess of rainbow glitter beside endless black ballpoint pen chickenscratch and you looked up at the hulking frame of your working prototype and it occurred to you that it was impossibly cruel to bring a mind into being just to see if you could.

So you didn’t.

You made little things. You built a robot with a strife-based rap function and a learning curve but it always lost against you and after a while you started to suspect that there wasn’t anything wrong with your programming and that it was intentionally selecting bad rhymes so you wouldn’t send it out into the world like you’d intended to, so you shut it down before it could start developing abandonment issues.

You started building another robot to rap against but stopped halfway through because without the first one the second would be equally alone and it sounded stupid and it still sounds stupid, even to you, but you worry enough about what you did wrong to make Dave look so goddamn old and tired sometimes and you didn’t want to do it again and then Dave turned twenty and moved out and now you’re alone, just like you’d always wanted to be before he’d barged in, the meteoric little turd.

But now you’re not used to being alone.

You’re not even sure you like being alone anymore, because when you’re alone and you run out of things to do, you start dissecting a lifetime of decision-making without even knowing what you’re looking for because this isn’t elementary school, nobody gives you a sticker or a _better luck next time_ to let you know if you passed or failed.

You take a moment to appreciate the irony inherent in that thought and then look down at the box again and think that there’s a difference between doing something to see if you can and doing something because you want to.

That difference is foresight and when you think about it, not every mind has to begin at childhood.

You know one that even you couldn’t fuck up any further.

==>

You’re experimenting with the sensitivity of the contact receptors on your rad neural headgear- they keep picking up interference from other electronics in the building and you can’t get a clean read but you’d really rather not indulge in off-the-cuff self-trepanation- when you hear somebody flop down on the futon in the other room.

Is it Wednesday? You think it might be Wednesday. On the rare occasions that Dave visits, it’s almost always on weekends.

When Egbert visits, it isn’t to sit and relax.

You exit the bedroom cautiously and look. It _is_ Egbert.

A glance tells you that there aren’t any obvious traps. A few steps tells you that there aren’t any particularly well-hidden ones, either.

You think about it and are amused by the results.

“Week’s a bit quick to be going into hiding. What, no hookers and blow first?”

He jumps a little when you speak and rolls his eyes at you over the back of the futon. “Yeah, because that will obviously help, obviously, drugs and prostitutes will clearly protect me from letters with pubes taped to them and weird podcast people who want interviews hanging out outside of my hotel room on internet interview ambush duty, you’re a genius, Bro, the genius is you-” and he’s rambling and keeps repeating himself and you wonder if he’s just tired and annoyed or if he has to write and practice his sets beforehand so they don’t come out like this, which is still pretty funny but a lot faster and presumably less easy to follow if you didn’t raise a kid who can mumble at the speed of light.

You roll your eyes without really caring if he can tell you’re doing it and then you realize he said _hotel room_ and just sort of eye him skeptically.

“Living in a hotel?” You ask him and then realize it’s been a while since you’ve actually spoken aloud because you’re doing that thing where you start sentences in the middle and condense words into a few hard mumbled consonants and it takes him a few seconds to parse what exactly “ _Livinina hotel?”_ means and then he looks at you like you’re stupid.

“Where else would I be staying?” and god this kid is such a snide piece of shit, you think you liked him better with a face full of Cheetos.

You consider remedying the noticeable absence of Cheetos in, on, and around his face.

You sigh instead, because you’re not stupid and you know where this is going.

“Here?” you ask and it's just a formality because you don’t get a key to someone’s house- you _still_ don’t know where the fuck he got it from, what the shit- and flop down on their couch without even knowing if they’re home if you think they’re going to stop you from crashing there.

Still, you’re kind of displeased about being so openly imposed on- because you’re a hypocrite who doesn’t want company unless you have a say in it but your say in it is pretty much always _no_ anyway- and the not-question comes out of you sounding like you’re trying to clear phlegm from your throat.

Evidently he understands it anyway which you expected because despite not having seen this kid since the last time he and Dave holed themselves up in Dave’s room for three weeks, you’re fast getting the impression that he’s not particularly good at hearing anything but what he wants to hear, anyway.

You make a vaguely welcoming gesture- it isn’t, really, but you tried, gold star for you- and turn to go back into your room because you guess you’ll be sleeping there now, as well.

Egbert makes a weird noise that you think is supposed to be a protest and you sort of turn to see what he wants and then he bombards you with _um_ s and _uh_ s until you start turning away again, at which point he rattles out something almost incomprehensible even to you and then you realize he just asked you if you weren’t going to stay and hang out.

You just look at him.

“Not your entertainment,” you mutter at him and whatever, fuck, you’re hyper-aware of your speech patterns now but pronouns and vowels and pauses between words are overrated anyway.

He looks at you like you’ve wronged him and complains that he’s bored- _booooored_ , there had to be at least five ‘ _o’_ s in there- and your eyebrows shoot up.

“Ord’narily, I‘d tell you to play games or someshit, but my xBox-” it comes out _macks-bawks_ and shit, you’ve _really_ let your enunciation go down the shitter, “-went a bit heavy on the drink.”

He has no idea what you just said.

You decide to go the diplomatic route and raise your palms face-up and lift your shoulders in the universal symbol of _“What the fuck do you want me to do about it?”_

He points at the couch beside him because he thinks you’re equally as confused by his speech as he is by yours, you guess, and looks at you with the goofy expectant smile of someone who is very used to being indulged.

“Your father’s a _Coddlebrand_ user, ‘nt he?”

It’s the clearest thing you’ve said yet. It’s also the most insulting.

He looks startled and then a little awed and you know the answer without being told, because anybody else would’ve been offended by the implication.

John Egbert is apparently spoiled enough to not _get_ the implication.

You reflect philosophically on how badly Dave would react if you strifed some discipline into his best friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the part where I finally mention the fridge horror sadstuck you've already read. Oops.
> 
> Edit Note: Thanks so much to _aa_ and _metronariston_ for pointing out issues I'd missed in respect to Houston and the particulars of Bro's accent. I've made some changes- not huge ones, but please bear with me: I'm going somewhere with this. It's like this for a reason and that reason makes sense, I swear to god.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you hadn't already noticed, this is going to be a slow build.
> 
> (Also I have a desperate weakness for appropriately bratty John, it's true.)

You’re not sure how you feel about John Egbert.

He doesn’t seem to begrudge you humiliating him in front of a live audience.

A plus.

He ruined a bunch of your shit; worse, he doesn’t seem to be aware that ruining a bunch of your shit could, theoretically, be kind of a big deal.

A minus.

He’s as funny now as he was before, if not funnier, given that you can now set traps for him and fail to avoid his traps for you at your leisure.

Plus.

You found this out because he invited himself into your apartment.

Minus.

He does groceries. He knows what to _do_ with groceries.

 _Plus_.

He follows you around like a goddamn puppy because, apparently, you have nothing better to do than humour him.

_Minus._

The math of it should mean you vacillate somewhere along the line separating slightly less apathetic from slightly more apathetic, but you’re anything but.

You either love this kid or hate him and you don’t honestly know which yet.

And then he runs your fireworks through a rinse cycle and just grins at you with his hands tucked behind his back and you know he doesn’t regret it in the least and _no_ , you definitely hate this kid, who cares what kind of tantrum Dave will throw, somebody needs to have the sass beaten out of them.

So you mumble rhymes to yourself and launch a few soft drinks at him- he dodges, fucker, and you paint the walls orange and sugary- and draw your katana and his eyes light up like Christmas just came early and he’s already got his hammer in his hand and wait, shit, you were wrong, _you love this kid, you fucking love this kid_.

You beat the shit out of him.

It’s just like having a little brother again.

==>

Egbert takes your shitkicking remarkably well. If anything, he seems to have expected it.

That’s not to say he’s not hobbling a bit, but he’s still relentlessly cheerful- maybe a bit more cheerful than before, which anybody but you would probably find weird- and you have to fight down some serious affection because Dave never took a beating without dishing out an equal and opposite amount of whining and this shit is _novel_.

It’s not even despite the sass.  Inexorably, even the sass is starting to grow on you.

It helps that he’s cute.

You reluctantly accepted that a couple days in. It’s weird. You’re weird. He’s way, _way_ too young for you, but he’s cute.

You may have a long and colourful history of impulse control problems, but he’s the brat that threw around _no homo_ like he was trying for copyright status the last time he visited, so you figure you’re safe.

There’s no harm in looking.

So you casually eye the shallow dimples that sit neatly above the back of his jeans while he putters around in the kitchen- you don’t know what he’s making, but it smells delicious and he seems determined to overfeed you as thoroughly as he alleges he was, it’s the best revenge plot you’ve ever been the victim of- until he tugs the hem of his shirt back down to where it society insists it belongs.

You look up. He’s looking at you. You’re very glad for your shades.

You mumble something interrogative and he tells you he’s making Thai food and you say _cool man, have fun with that_ and turn back around and try to figure out what the hell is happening in this movie.

You replaced your television when you realized that Egbert wasn’t going to leave you alone without another source of entertainment.

It didn’t work.

If you don’t humour him by watching whatever he’s dredged from his terrible movie selection, he feels the need to extol the plot to you, complete with full scene re-enactments in which all the characters are played by him.

You watch his terrible movies with him.

At least this way you can admire the view when he gets up to change the DVD.

Like always, you have no idea what’s going on. Egbert keeps popping out of the kitchen to comment on things you haven’t actually paid any attention to and therefore have no opinion on.

That’s fine.

He carries on a conversation just fine on his own, and after years with an unnervingly quiet Dave- respectively, at least, little fucker still runs at the mouth like an ornamental tap- you finally feel like things are how they’re supposed to be.

It’s totally irrational.

You don’t give a shit.

You hear footsteps approaching the futon and turn expectantly. He grins at you and you notice that he has blue eyes and wonder what it’s like to have something on the normal colour spectrum.

And then he steals your hat and shoves it on his own head and there’s no way he’s looking for a fight already, he’s still limping, but he’s grinning that mischievous little grin at you and wearing your hat and you don’t think it’s having the effect he intended it to.

You snap your thumb out and flick the beak upwards and he squawks and grabs at it and you smile a bit without wanting to because this kid is _really damn cute sometimes, shit_ , so you flick him in the stomach and he’s gotten used to your jabs because he uses to opportunity to grab at your glasses and you catch his wrists because he’s still too slow, too slow by _years_.

“Yo, hands off,” you tell him, and you know he understands you because he does that sly little thing where he looks at you through his eyelashes to check whether or not he can convince you that he wasn’t really listening.

You’ve learned a lot about Egbert in a very few days.

You’ve learned that he will get away with exactly as much as you let him get away with.

You let him get away with more than you probably should.

He squirms a little in your hold so you let him go but he immediately goes for your shades so you grab him again and raise an eyebrow.

You learn another thing.

He pouts.

You’re not sure what to do about it.

The moment starts to get a little long and you become uncomfortably aware of the fact that you’ve got a kid half your age by the wrists so you let go and just let him take your damn glasses, whatever.

He pauses before putting them on and stares at you and you know why, you know _exactly_ why.

But he just says “You have white eyelashes!” and suddenly you don’t know anything anymore and then he puts on your shades and twists your cap to the side and throws up gang signs and does a _really_ terrible impression of you and it’s _great_ , it’s so bad it’s great.

And then he stops and just sort of looks at you again and you just look back, a little perturbed that, for once, _you_ can’t see _his_ eyes.

“Do you want to go to Vegas? I have a show.”

You’re not sure how you feel about this.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Clickers are people on the streets of Las Vegas who hand out cards advertising the services of prostitutes. As far as I'm aware, soliciting and procuring isn't legal, so clickers slap the cards against their wrists or palms to attract the attention of passersby and give out the cards without actively breaking the law.
> 
> As always, I have the loveliest reviewers. Never feel afraid to review! I love hearing from you.

You’re faintly amused by the fact that Egbert successfully went less than a week sleeping somewhere other than a hotel room.

You’re slightly disconcerted by the fact that you’re in a suite, so instead of getting to crash his room in a drunken stupor - and bother people in the hall on the way, which is half the point, really- you get to creep across a shared living space like a nervous teenager sneaking into his crush’s bed and _woah, no, that got weird fast._

Not that you can blame your brain for going there.

This whole thing is suggestive in that strange, sidelong way that only very sneaky or very naïve people can manage and though you know Egbert’s the second, you can’t help but wonder.

When he said _I have a show_ , you assumed that meant a gig. Singular. Drive up, crash out, fuck around and waste time while he does his thing, start to drive back down, pull over halfway to strife because he drives like an old man and his daddy gave him a Prius for his twentieth birthday and sometimes you’re overwhelmed with the need to compensate for his years of indulgent parenting, take a breather, discuss politics, humour his limited understanding of politics, drive the rest of the way home, crash out.

Instead, you were crossing state borders into Nevada when he told you that you were going to be there for three days and two nights- package deal for the internet star, you guess, people are complicated and porn is simple and somewhere along the way society left you behind to play with your filthy stuffed toys- and you made some crack about being classy-ass Las Vegas honeymooners and then interrupted yourself to tell him that you secretly moonlight as a lounge singer, _how did he know_ , and he almost swerved into oncoming traffic.

You think you’ve handled this remarkably well, all things considered- and by all things you mean the thing where you bit your tongue and didn’t remark on the weirdness of your rooming arrangements because it _shouldn’t_ be weird, you’re just _making_ it weird and commenting on it would just make it weirder.

So you keep it as unweird as it can be when the living room you’re sitting in has a picture window almost as wide as your field of view and the couch you’re sitting on was probably made from baby seals and bleached an expensive cream colour by the tears of broken marriages, all of which were brokered in by an Elvis impersonator and brokered out by regret.

Las Vegas is a weird place, and it makes you feel all the weirder for not being the weirdest person in it.

It’s almost _too_ ironic.

==>

Egbert doesn’t get it. This does not surprise you.

You get why he doesn’t get it. You’re restless. You don’t like sitting down, you don’t want to lie down, hell, you don’t even want to stand, because everything in here is that particular shade of expensive-shit-you-don’t-own off-white and you-break-it-you-buy-it espresso brown and it’s all been touched and fondled and fucked on by other people and you’re not home, this isn’t home, you can’t relax here.

 _So come look around with me, you don’t have to stay in the hotel for three days straight, jeez,_ he says, like it’s that easy, but out there is worse because you can’t actually remember the last time you left Texas and out there is most _definitely_ not Texas, _you’re not in Texas anymore,_ shit’s all misquote Wizard of Oz and you want nothing to do with it.

Buckteeth the beaver wonderboy looks at you like you’ve lost your mind. 

You get that, too.

“Dude, I thought you’d love this, why’d you even come if you were just gonna get all weird?” he asks and when he asks you questions like that you can’t help but think he asks them with multiple question marks, you can almost _hear_ them lingering on the end of his sentences, and it makes you even antsier because you don’t really know how to answer that in a way that’s not creepy or pathetic.

You shrug irritably and he _laughs_ , the fucker laughs, and you want so badly to strife him right now but you’ll damage something and if you damage something you might get kicked out and he might lose his opportunity to make it here and then he might stop coming around and you don’t want that, you really don’t want that, and you’re making yourself uncomfortable again.

You wonder if his involvement is making this better or worse than it would be otherwise.

You don’t know.

==>

He successfully forces you to leave the hotel.

You shove your hands in your pockets and touch nothing and respond to nothing because you dislike being forced to interact with people and you dislike being talked to and you dislike people who are unrepentantly sincere about being utter fucking weirdos and even if he’s too self-absorbed to notice, he will damn well know that you are only putting up with this for him because you’re not above ironic passive-aggression right now.

 The clickers won’t stop trying to offer you cards.

Egbert has an almost unmanageable handful- _I’m gonna airmail a chocolate box full of them to Rose, it’ll be so great_ \- by the second block.

You pass another casino and some woman in leopard print everything- it’s a catsuit, she’s wearing a leopard fucking catsuit and gold stilettos in the middle of the afternoon and she genuinely thinks she’s the hottest shit ever- eyes you appreciatively and you hate her, you hate her catsuit and her bad extensions and her boobjob, you hate this city and everyone in it because it’s full of people who don’t have enough common sense to recognize that you _want_ them to be uncomfortable around you and you hate Egbert for bringing you here until he grabs your sleeve to get your attention and grins and points and shouts something you don’t listen to because you’re too busy hating yourself for not being able to hate him the instant those stupid fucking teeth come out.

He drags you into a place that sells the exact same shitty Chinese take-out as the one down the street from your apartment and you _love him, you love this kid,_ it’s killing you _._

==>

You lost some sort of boundary with him when you let him take your shades and you can’t get it back because now he won’t stop casually touching you and you’re losing your fucking mind.

It wasn’t so bad in the car- _both hands on the wheel, Egbert_ \- or in public- _jesus christ, do we need to hire a priest to ordain this thing, man?-_ but now you’re alone and you’re grateful to be in from the crush and the noise so you’ve finally settled down and stopped pacing so he’s stopped following you which means that he’s doing things with his hands rather than with his feet.

Things like leaning over the back of the sofa and putting his hands on your shoulders while he chatters on about something that’s happening on the big fucking plasma screen you’re too distracted to pay attention to or about how nervous he’s getting and how he hopes he _won’t screw up, haha!!_ but you’re not really listening to that either because he’s absentmindedly tapping the first two fingers on his left hand against your collarbone and you want that to stop but you don’t want to start a cold fast slide down weird mountain so you say nothing.

You just concentrate on not being a huge creep and, so far, you think you’re doing a pretty good job.

And then he cooes _Bro- Broooo_ , this kid always uses too many _‘o’_ s when he wants something _-_ in your ear like exactly the kind of huge creep you're trying not to be and your muscles seize with the effort of not flashstepping forward about ten feet and the effect is sort of a full-body spasm and he laughs.

“You weren’t listening,” he complains.

Your answer is nothing but a string of meaningless syllables and neither of you know what you just said but you don’t care, because holy shit do you ever need a drink.

You relish the cold air that surges out of the fridge and squat down to stare sightlessly at the shitty twelve-pack you insisted on bringing back- apparently people in Las Vegas hotels drink vodka and tequila and nothing else- and then Egbert is there, standing so close behind you that it doesn’t matter that he’s not touching you, he may as well be.

“Can I have one?” he asks and there are so many inexplicable question marks there and you just shove a can up over your shoulder and almost hit him in the face and very seriously consider drinking your beer exactly where you are.

You consider crawling into the fridge. If you move a few shelves, fitting may be a possibility.

And then Egbert’s can hisses and you remember that he has a show and frown over your shoulder at him.

“Take it easy,” you warn. “You’re not of age yet, are you?”

He treats you to a melodramatic eyeroll. “It’s not like I haven’t had a drink before, Bro, not all places are as strict as this one.”

You roll your eyes right back. “Just tryin’ to look out for you, kid.”

He snorts while you stand, groaning at the ache in your knees. “I’m not a kid.”

“Yeah, I know. You’re a whole twenty years old, good fucking job, so proud of you, bro.”

Egbert pauses mid-sip and scrunches up his nose. “I’m not your bro, Bro.”

You raise an eyebrow. “What, you’re going to refuse a prime invitation into Striderdom? Ungrateful little shit.”

You’re mostly joking, but when he scoffs, you’re a bit insulted.

When he leaves to perform, you write your last name- in all capitals, of course- in the back of all of his underwear.

These two events are unrelated.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp.

You wake up to a searingly bright Vegas sunrise and realize that you passed out in the living room.

This does not surprise you.

The brightness does. Your shades are gone. So is your cap.

You smell eggs and bacon and peer over the back of the couch in squinty, bleary-eyed suspicion, entirely too aware of how non-threatening you must look because even without a mirror you know your hair is doing something weird because the left side of your scalp has that raw tenderness particular to sleeping on your hair in a really bizarre way. You touch it gingerly.

Yeah, it’s doing something weird.

Egbert’s grinning sunnily back at you before you can even consider flashstepping discreetly into your room and you hate him because the buildings outside are still indistinct black pillars in a sea of pain and it can’t be seven in the morning yet, the time is, definitively, a quarter to way-too-fucking-early.

You mumble something that sounds like it might be a question without even knowing if it is and somehow he understands you.

“I got in at about one,” he chatters and then pauses to do something that sounds distinctly like cracking an egg into a frying pan, judging by the sizzle. “Last night was so great, you should’ve come! The staff people were super nice and the audience was really good and nobody shouted anything weird-” he pauses and chew his lip and you’re suddenly grateful it’s too early for you to find that distracting “-well, except when they were asking about you, but I guess I kind of expected that. I wanted to tell you about it last night, but you were already asleep!”

You grunt. He’s like the star of a Saturday morning cartoon and you wish you were _still_ asleep.

“Shades?” and your voice is a barely a croak but everything’s fine because subjects and verbs are lame, you’re way too cool for functional sentence structure, especially at let-me-sleep-Egbert o’clock.

 He doesn’t give you an answer. He does give you food.

==>

You find your hat and shades on your bedside table and suffer from momentary confusion because the irony of helpfully placing them beside a bed you didn’t even sleep in is kind of astronomical.

And then you remember that the culprit is Egbert and accept that he probably had some sort of inscrutable reasoning for it that you will never understand.

And then you realize that his reasoning isn’t really all that inscrutable because your duffel bag is open and you didn’t open it.

The waistband of your underwear appears to have been co-opted by the Egbert family.

It appears that should you pass out in public somewhere- and, by some fluke, not be naked while doing so- any concerned passerby with an interest in undressing you will be able to return you to your rightful owner.

You dubbed him a Strider via his underpants- no small compliment, though you doubt he cottoned on.

He gave you a return address.

It’s not yours.

 _This_ _cheeky little fucker._

Though you do have to admit that you appreciate the irony of him blithely laying claim to the contents of your pants, however unintentional that may have been.

But that doesn’t mean you’ll stand for it. You’re not an Egbert.

You’re a Strider.

Just because you have underwear doesn’t mean you have to wear them.

==>

Las Vegas has redeemed itself to you.

You are never leaving this shower.

==>

You leave the shower at a more reasonable hour in the morning.

Egbert looks a bit awestruck, if incredulous. You justify his silent question with the only appropriate response: more silence.

So you tuck in your shirt and immediately pull it out again because despite the air conditioning, the temperature in the room began to rise as soon as sunlight hit the window and it’s already too hot to be comfortable.

Actually, you wish you weren’t wearing a shirt at all, but you figure you need to compromise in the interest of keeping things unweird.

You seem to be doing a better job at this than Egbert, who has apparently been looking at your beltline the entire time.

He looks faintly confused.

You stop and wait for it, because you know exactly where this is going and where it’s going is the land of amazing reactions, you can feel it, this is going to amazing.

His face flickers with realization. Disbelief.

You wait.

 _Scarlet_.

Not even red- this kid blushes like the pulpy writing in a bad novel featuring vampires or wizards or something, he’s absolutely fucking scarlet from forehead to shirt collar and it’s the funniest shit you’ve ever seen because you know it didn’t even occur to him that you’d go commando and you _win_ , there isn’t a doubt, this case is closed with no chance for parole, you win and you both know it.

His eyes snap up and he immediately devolves into a mess of jerky, frantic movements so particular to someone who just realizes they’ve been caught staring that you don’t even care that you just raised the weirdness level, this is _hilarious, holy shit_.

You flop down on the couch beside him as casually as possible, which is pretty damn casual considering that any awkwardness you may have felt has been completely consumed by the smug embrace of victory.

You glance at him surreptitiously.

Even the tip of his nose is red, _jesus_.

You settle in to pretending to watch whatever horseshit is on the television because he keeps looking at you whenever he thinks you aren’t watching and however hilarious escalating this could be, regrettably, you still have an obligation not to do a swan dive into weird lake.

On the plus side, he makes no attempt to touch you.

Childishly, you make no attempt not to be disappointed by this.

==>

Fifteen minutes after Egbert leaves for his second show, you realize that he forgot his room key in a moment of brilliance.

You stare at it.

You look at the time.

You stare at it again.

There’s no way he’s gone on stage yet.

The venue and the hotel are, functionally, the same building.

Theoretically, you could bring it to him.

 Theoretically, you could go downstairs, walk through a lobby full of people who know exactly what you look like if not exactly who you are, give Egbert his room key, risk him trying to rope you into staying for his act for reasons that you sincerely doubt would be in your best interests, walk _back_ through a lobby full of people who know exactly what you look like if not exactly who you are and who will have, at this point, fully recognized your presence, and go back upstairs.

Alternatively, you could stay the fuck where you are and just make sure you’re awake when Egbert gets back.

You still have eight cans of beer remaining.

==>

You have one can of beer remaining.

You’re holding it. You’re also staring at it philosophically for reasons you can’t quite put words to at the moment.

You hear shuffling.

This is significant, somehow.

You philosophize about why.

The shuffling swears.

You remember why. You unlock the door.

Egbert looks at you like you just flew into a burning building to save him.

“I forgot my-”

“You did,” you agree complacently, and toss the card at him. He fumbles it and ends up deflecting its fall with his knee, failing to catch it, and almost falling over. You snicker as he picks it up.

He squints at you, at your beer, and then at the empty cans on the counter.

“Are you _drunk_?”

“I’ve been drinkin’,” you hedge evasively and _oh_ , _yeah_ , that’s why you had to think about this beer, you haven’t eaten since noon, that explains a lot.

He just laughs. “Me too.”

Your mind whirs sluggishly for a second and you put down the beer and open the fridge. The cold air is just as nice as it was yesterday, if not nicer.

And a bit sobering.

You frown and look over your shoulder at him and wonder how often you’re going to scold him for something halfway inside of a refrigerator because this is the second day in a row.

You close it decisively and feel a little more in control of your life.

“You’re underage,” you tell him and he looks at you like you’re an idiot because he already knows that, which you suppose he does.

He _pfft_ s at you.

“Backstage is different,” he says breezily, “everybody’s always busy so the other performers snuck me a few beers and nobody caught me, it was awesome.”

You didn’t even know there _were_ other performers. You also feel incredibly old because _damn_ , it’s been a long time since anyone had to sneak you a beer.

You shake your head and turn back to the fridge.

It’s closed.

It takes you a moment to remember why.

You’re as baffled by your midnight existential crisis as anyone else would be.

You hear the distinctive click and hiss of a beer opening and look at Egbert again.

Yeah, he’s got your last beer.

That wouldn’t be a problem, he can have it, but he’s looking at you with bright eyes and a big shit-eating grin, like he expects you to do something about it. Like he _wants_ you to do something about it.

You shouldn’t.

You really shouldn’t.

You tuck your hands in your pockets and stare him down. He just grins and raises the can to his lips.

“Don’t make me kick your ass, kid,” and it’s an empty threat because you can’t risk damaging anything in here, but that doesn’t mean you can’t wrestle his stupid ass to the ground and get him in a hold but _that_ is by far the stupidest thing you could do right now because you really want to and you know from a long history of incredibly stupid decisions that you are a master of falling down the slippery slope of shit-you-really-shouldn’t-do.

But you _really_ want to.

He’s watching you over the top of the can.

You flick the bottom of the can up and he jerks, chokes, and spews shitty beer all over himself.

Well, and you. That’s fine. Your shirt is an acceptable loss.

 He’s still laughing, and that’s what’s important.

He looks at you impishly, up through the eyelashes, and you have a nagging feeling that there’s something you’re not quite getting here.

And then he dries his face on a drier part of your shirt and you grab him by the scruff of the neck and headlock him because _hell no_.

He jabs his elbow into the back of your knee. You both go down.

You grab for the front of his shirt.

He grabs for your belt and a breaker flips in your brain and _oh christ_ , you know exactly what’s going on here and it would probably be better if you didn’t.

He seems to register the sudden change in your posture because he’s looking at you, still smiling but a little nervous and a little guilty and he’s always looked a little nervous at times but you assumed that was just his personality and _oh shit, this is bad, this is really bad._

You’re not into forcing people to do things. That’s not one of your kinks, numerous as they may be.

You are, however, spectacularly terrible at resisting temptation, and you have an almost prophetic vision of what’s going to happen if you don’t put on your adult pants and address this openly.

What’s going to happen is you’re going to fail spectacularly at resisting temptation.

He steals your hat. You don’t even try to stop him.

He’s starting to look a little anxious.

You run a hand through your hair because _fuck_ , talking about things is hard.

“Look, Egbert,” you start and he interrupts you.

“You can call me John, you know-” and he’s gearing up for a ramble that you suspect is entirely for the purposes of not having this conversation. You can understand.

“ _John,_ ” you correct, and he shuts up. “I’m… look. Hypothetical scenario: Two girls. Best friends. One comes to visit the other all’a goddamn time when they’re kids. Shows up later, after the other girl moves out. Big bro-” he tries to interrupt you about how you didn’t mention a big brother anywhere in there, _nope!!_ and you tell him to shut the fuck up and listen. “Big bro sees nothin’ wrong with this. Chick makes an excuse anyway.”

He’s clammed right the fuck up. He also seems to be revisiting his earlier acquaintance with the colour red.

“Keeps coming around. Basically moves in. Follows him around like a fuckin’ puppy. Wants constant attention. Picks fights for attention. Play fights, I dunno, maybe as an excuse for casual contact that doesn’t involve a beatdown.”

He’s pulled the bill of the cap down over his face. You can still see his neck. It’s firmly reacquainted with the colour red, his neck and red are so damn acquainted they’re practically throwing an engagement party.

You sigh. “This shit sounds like the plot of a bad anime. Are you a bad anime, John?” and jesus christ that may just be the weirdest and most contextually inappropriate interjection into a conversation you’ve ever had the misfortune of being in, good job, you’re on a roll.

He mumbles something.

It takes you a second to realize what he said.

“I’m not a girl,” he repeats sulkily.

You can’t help it. You laugh a bit at his expense. “Good job missing the point there.”

He’s quiet, quieter than he’s ever been around you. You run your hand through your hair again, pulling a bit like it’ll make you sober and mature enough to want to have this conversation.

“I get that shit changes as you get older. There’s nothin’ wrong with it. But-”

 _Fuck,_ this is hard.

You don’t want to encourage him.

Selfishly, you don’t want _discourage_ him.

You don’t even _know_ what you fucking want.

“But?” he asks. It’s barely a question.

“But I’m your best friend’s bro. But I’m twice your age. But I don’t think your father would much appreciate my having anything more to do with you than I already do.”

As soon as you say it, you feel a little hollow.

To your surprise, he snorts and peers at you from under your cap.

“Are you serious? My father would write me an encouraging note. SON,” he starts, and it’s a hilariously melodramatic imitation of a serious baritone, complete with knitted eyebrows, “IF YOU’RE READING THIS, IT MEANS YOU’VE DISCOVERED THAT LOVE IS NOT CONSTRAINED BY AGE OR GENDER. I AM SO, SO, SO PROUD OF YOU. He’s probably already written it, just in case.”

You raise an eyebrow slowly.

He looks confused for a second and then raises his hands defensively. “I don’t mean I’m in love with you that’s just what my Dad would say he’s ridiculous _oh my god-_ ”

“I’m still Dave’s bro,” you interrupt, albeit reluctantly. “And I’m still twice your age.”

You can just see the shine of his glasses from under the bill of your hat.

He’s chewing his lip. You’re no longer too sleepy to be distracted. In fact, you’re too buzzed not to be distracted, and you feel vaguely guilty about it.

“Dave doesn’t have to know,” and he’s muttering, the two of you are having a mumble party on the floor of a kitchenette in a Las Vegas hotel and this train of thought is getting away from you. “And I don’t care.”

You’re not sure what to say to that.

He lifts his head slightly, and you can see his eyes again and he’s looking at your face but he won’t meet your eyes and you start to say something, anything, but he interrupts you again.

“You haven’t said _no_ ,” he points out and you can tell he knows he’s pushing his luck but you _haven’t_ said no and you can’t really bring yourself to say no but feeding him some bullshit like _I can’t_ is just going to look worse because you _can_ , you just _shouldn’t,_ so you say nothing and you know he knows what that means, too.

“I’m not asking you to marry me or anything,” he says and it’s a valid point but you think you may be overestimating its validity on account of wanting an excuse to say _yes_ because saying _no_ would mean making shit awkward in the worst way and you’ll probably never see him again after tomorrow if you say no. “I’ve just… I’ve never done this before.”

It’s insane how shy and nervous he sounds when he says it.

It’s insane how completely hearing him say it makes you want to ruin him and _woah, you might just be a terrible fucking person, holy christ._

You should say no.

You should lay down a definitive verbal smackdown in the form of an absolute, inarguable _no._

Instead, you close your eyes and run your hand through your hair again and consider that you may be developing a nervous tick and consider that you’re genuinely an awful human being because you spent years thinking Dave had a boner for this kid and yet you haven’t put an end to this discussion yet and _oh, apparently Egbert’s an opportunist,_ but you guess you already sort of knew that _._

It’s not really a kiss. As far as you know, a kiss doesn’t typically involve being so goddamn jittery with nerves that you smash your teeth against the other person’s and then try to abscond.

You grab him by the shirt before he can.

“You’re fuckin’ terrible at that.”

He’s better at reciprocating than he is at initiating.

 _You_ , however, are going to hell. If you weren’t already, you’re pretty sure you are now.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the author betrays rather strong feelings about how consent is sexy. (I'm not a huge fan of pushy dub-con Bro. Have some careful-and-experienced-member-of-the-kink-community Bro.)
> 
> That said, there's no wild smut in this chapter, sorry! It'll happen. Patience. In the meantime, I intend to make you fall desperately in love with a one-time rapping ventriloquist who makes plush porn and keeps fireworks in the dishwasher and cherry bombs in the ice cube dispenser. 
> 
> Fair warning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have the best reviewers. The best. You guys are actually phenomenal. Thank you so much for being such lovely babies, have an update.

You’re a bad man.

Your karmic chisel scraped that into the fabric of the fucking universe the second you pulled your brother’s best friend, a kid half your age, down into your lap. Your cosmic graffiti is your epitaph, immortalizing how completely you failed to say _no_ to an impossibly spoiled Daddy’s boy just hitting his experimental stage _._

 Later, you’ll go into the shower for your routine post-fuck-up mental breakdown and agonize over how you might actually be the devil because you _won’t_ regret it, you already _know_ you won’t regret it because you _never_ do, you’ll just regret being mysteriously incapable of regretting things you should because regretting _something_ makes you feel like a little less of a monster.

You’re a bad man. It’s fact now.

That doesn’t mean you have to behave like one.

Egbert- _John_ , it’s _John_ , you guess you should stop thinking about him by his last name if you’re going to be calling him by his first- is shaking when you pull your lips from his.

He looks terrified.

You know why.

He’s also incredibly stubborn.

You already knew that.

The fact of the matter is that he’s shaking with anxiety but he won’t get off of you and you know it’s because he’s afraid you’ll change your mind.

You’re not going to change your mind. You _wish_ you had the capacity to feel guilty enough about this to change your mind but _no, stop, the period of self-loathing comes later, in private_ , so you stop thinking about changing your mind and run your thumb up his jawline and just wait for him to set a pace he’s comfortable with because _you_ may be incapable of saying no but that doesn’t mean you aren’t going to make damn sure he has the option.

Judging by the way he looks at you while he repositions himself in your lap, he’s a little surprised by how gentle you’re being.

His head is still tilted down, but he’s looking up at you cautiously from under your cap and if this is happening then _no_ , _this security blanket behaviour has to stop_ because you won’t be able to tell if he hits a point where he’s just going along with it because he feels like he has to because he asked for it, so you flick the cap off of his head and this time he makes no attempt to stop you and it just falls to the tiles behind him with a quiet _whumph_.

You thread your fingers through his hair, slightly bemused by the smoothness of it- like fine wire, stiff but not coarse, a breezy mess of cowlicks and natural unmanageability.

It suits him.

He’s watching you. You watch him right back and he ducks his head again.

You don’t bother telling him that you can stop if he wants to because he doesn’t want to and he won’t.  You have the feeling you won’t be moving from this spot for a while. The edge of the cupboard is digging into your spine. You guess you’ll just have to deal with it and _woah, hey,_ that’s your shirt and _jesus his hands are cold._

This kid is unbelievable- you look at him and he’s a shivering mess, you look away and he rushes a haphazard move on you, he’s like a goddamn _Boo_ _and this isn’t the time for video game references, stop zoning out, you drunk asshole._

For a second, you think he’s going to pull them back. Hell, you’re pretty sure he thinks he’s going to pull them back.

He doesn’t.

He starts running his _icy fucking_ _fingertips_ along your beltline and just under your shirt and he giggles at your hiss of discomfort, the little prick.

You tell him he could use his hands to cool boiling water and he responds by pushing your shirt further up and running them lightly along your abs.

You’re shivering now, too, and it’s at least partially to do with the fact that John is actually a popsicle masquerading as a human being.

Some part of you that’s a bit drunker than the rest wonders nonsensically about the flavour and you resist the great urge to punch yourself in the face.

He _hmm_ s quietly in his throat, looking a lot calmer. You’re glad.

“You’re so warm,” and it’s barely a murmur but his look answers a question you would never ask aloud because you weren’t even sure if he went into this knowing he was attracted to men or if he’s just experimenting and it’s been a long time since someone’s looked at you like that but yeah, _you remember that look, you’re in deep shit now._

He ghosts his fingertips along the dips between your muscles and you shiver again because you want to touch him _so badly_ but you’re taking this at his pace and you don’t know if his pace includes reciprocation at this point.

You risk resting your hands on his hips for a moment. He bites his lip. You assume this is a good sign. You don’t push it.

You let him kiss you again. He’s better at it when he’s not doing the hit-and-run variant.

When he pulls away, he rests his forehead against yours and curls his hands a bit around your sides. It’s nice.

Then he headbutts you lightly and it’s not so nice.

“I’m not going to freak out if you touch me,” and _oh_ , you know what this is, “that’s kind of the point.”

You deadpan at him because you seem to have forgotten who you were making out with for a minute there and it just fucking _figures_ that he’d take your carefulness as an excuse to be bossy with you.

Well, then.

“A’right,” you say, and pull his hips flush to yours and _now_ he gets shy again, of course. You laugh at him and feel kind of bad about it because _of_ _course_ he’s nervous, who wouldn’t be nervous alone in a hotel room in a strange city with a strange man?

You may not be a stranger, but there are few men as patently _strange_ as you, so the analogy holds.

“Do you want to stop?” and you asking is just a formality because as much as you hate communicating, you do need to communicate and seeing him shake his head- _use your words, John_ and that suddenly gets weird because you used to say that to Dave as a kid and you can tell by his expression that he knows that- is different from reading his body language.

You tell him you’re not going to make his decisions for him.

He rolls his eyes at you and kisses you slowly, carefully, and you’re kind of proud in a weird way because he’s learning fast.

You run your palm up the side of his neck and he makes a little sound of approval, so you move your mouth from his lips to the soft hollow below his ear and he _moans_ and yeah, you’d say he’s okay with this.

You laugh a bit against neck and he jabs you in the gut and then swears because your muscles are bundled up and tense from the strain of this weird position and he somehow managed to hurt his finger on you. You laugh more. He bites you. _Hard._

You’re pretty sure it was meant to be spiteful.

You know for a fact that any illusions he may have had about you not finding that _really goddamn hot_ disappeared with the sound you made.

He just sort of pauses with his face in the crook of your neck and you hope you didn’t just weird him out because that’s probably the most vanilla kink you have, honestly.

He nips at you again and you grab his hips, maybe a little _too_ hard, but he’s tracing his fingers under your beltline and pulling a little at your belt buckle and he makes a hilarious little whining sound when you stop him and you laugh again.

And you can tell he’s getting frustrated because he bites you even _harder-_ you can feel a sick grind in your trapezius and _that is definitely going to leave a really brutal bruise-_ and you guess he just doesn’t get that this is entirely the wrong way to go about dominance play with you because he’d probably have to draw blood for you to stop enjoying it.

Actually, you’d probably still enjoy it.

He pulls back a bit and glowers at you when you lean in to kiss him.

You tell him to “Stop sulking, christ,” and interrupt him when he says that he isn’t and he sulks even more, crossing his arms across his chest.  “I don’t know what you want from me, man.”

He looks at you like you’re stupid and makes a play for your belt buckle again.

“And what are you plannin’ on doin’ down there?”

He’s starting to blush again. The look he shoots you teeters between pleading incredulity and intense frustration. You wait.

“I dunno,” he mumbles and he could practically be you when he’s nervous or embarrassed and _well, that was a weird thought_ , “something.”

You snort at his evasiveness and gently grab his wrist because he’s playing with the end of your belt and you’re finding it _very_ distracting.

You don’t particularly want to stop him, but the intrusive edge of the cupboard you’re leaning against is helping.

“Not when you’re drunk,” and _now_ you lay down the law, now of all times when he’s probably already flying half-mast and he’s left a big fuckoff bruise on your shoulder and you’re really kind of terrible at this, _wow_.

He sulks. “I’m not drunk, you’re drunk.”

“Not unless you’re sober,” you amend. He groans disbelievingly.

It takes a little bit of doing to wrestle him off of your lap and _yo,_ it was supposed to be _you_ who was policing consent here, _how the hell_ did you ever think this kid was in danger of shutting up and taking it when he’s such a huge _brat_ about stopping and you pretend to be pissed at him but you’re actually kind of relieved because it’s better that he says what he wants, there’s zero risk of you not beating his ass if he gets pushy with you.

 He grumbles about it, but he agrees to go to bed.

You tell him he has to go to _his_ bed and he sulks, but he goes.

You lock your door, just in case.

==>

You’re too busy grappling with guilt to enjoy this awesome shower.

What a shame.

==>

You expect the morning after to be awkward.

It is.

For about an hour.

You don’t say anything about what happened.

He doesn’t say anything about what happened.

You act like nothing’s out of the ordinary and put an ice cube down his shirt while he’s cooking and steal food from his plate when you’re eating and then finally he gets sick of your bullshit and grabs you by the collar and kisses you and it’s only a little nervous and it stops being nervous at all when you kiss him back.

His hands fly to your beltline and you wonder what his goddamn obsession with the top of your pants is and then he makes a little sound in his throat and you realize that you already know.

You’re not wearing underwear.

He’s into it.

You chuckle into his mouth. He bites your lip insistently and _woah_ , you think he might be backing you up towards the couch, it’s not even noon and he’s getting ambitious with you.

You make a warning sound and push him away and the look he shoots you says _you’re completely impossible, ugh._

“I’m sober,” he tells you and he sounds like he’s talking to a small child and you smack him upside the head for his sass.

“You want a hooker, call one,” you tease, thumbing towards the generous pile of cards he accumulated on your outing.

He treats you to the eyeroll of all eyerolls and hooks his fingers into your belt and _pulls_.

You’re not overly fond of being told what to do. You rock back on your heels in defiance.

His face does something that looks alarmingly like cunning and you register it too late because he lets go and you fall flat on your ass and he gets that mischievous look and you know what he’s trying to do but you can’t really prevent it because you’re already wrestling and he’s a sight stronger than he looks.

 He’s not as strong as you.

You get him on his back.

He bites his lip and gets a little fidgety and you realize that he wants to be there and you realize that you like that he wants to be there and you realize something else.

It’s almost embarrassing how into each other you are.

==>

It’s also difficult.

You swear to yourself you’ll make it home without doing anything nefarious to him but he pulls over halfway and climbs into your lap before you can take off your seatbelt and grinds on you and rakes his teeth along your throat and twists his fingers into your hair and _pulls_ and then casually climbs back into the driver’s seat like he didn’t just play your milder kinks like the lead woodwind in the orchestra pit and you deserve this but _you’re dying, he’s fucking killing you_.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A wild smut appears!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have three days of updates in a row.
> 
> This one has a little plot and a lot of frottage. Time to add some more tags about what a dirtbag I am, I guess.

He jumps you the second you get the door closed behind you, which is pretty much what you expected.

After more than twenty hours in a car, you’re exhausted. You feel old. His never-ending caffeine high makes you feel old.

You indulge him inexpertly shoving his tongue down your throat because all things considered, he’s been remarkably patient for a sexually frustrated twenty-year-old.

A little shit, _yes_ , but a relatively patient little shit.

Your ass starts to vibrate.

You bite his tongue lightly and he yelps and pulls away because, as you quickly discovered, he’s way more into biting you than being bitten.

He frowns at you as you pull out your phone and grabs for it and you shove him away by the face. “Fuck off for a second, Lolita, phone,” and he asks you if _you_ _really just made a Nabokov reference??_ as you check the screen.

It’s Dave.

You pick up. “Yo.”

_“Is John there?”_

There’s a weird tension in his voice. You think you can hear someone talking in the background.

You look at John.

Your silence is answer enough, apparently.

_“Pass John the phone, Bro.”_

You give John the phone. You don’t even sass Dave for being rude.

John looks at you questioningly. “Hello…?”

And suddenly his eyes go wide and his face goes white and he looks _ludicrously guilty_ , what the _fuck_.

He shoves the phone back at you. You tuck your hands in your pockets. “He asked for you.”

He brings it back to his ear gingerly. You can hear Dave rambling and understand bits and pieces and John must not be okay with that because he starts powerwalking into the other room in the most suspicious way anyone has ever powerwalked, which is typically fairly suspicious to you anyway, being more of a saunterer.

You go to follow him and he sort of scuttles back around you and you’re kind of bemused and he locks himself in the bathroom _and something’s up, you’re not an idiot_.

You worry.

You _did_ think Dave had bromantic interest in the bucktooth wonder, but then he started dating Harley.

Who is, incidentally, another bucktoothed wonder, if you're remembering correctly.

You feel like an idiot. You feel like an asshole.

Mostly you just feel intensely suspicious because Dave knew John was with you and John didn’t look like someone who doesn’t know his best bro is waxing homopoetic over him.

 _If_ he’s waxing. You’re still not sure. If he is, you’re just as entitled to beat him down for leading Harley on as he is for your increasingly dirty relationship with his best friend and Dave may be a tool but he’s a good kid and you’d like to believe he wouldn’t substitute one for the other.

Dave didn’t sound like he was about to warn Egbert about you, either. He sounded-

You don’t even know.

You just lean against the wall and watch the bathroom door and think until Egbert comes out, a little flushed and jittery and _guilty_ , you can see it in his face.

You stare him down.

He gives you your phone.

You stare him down.

He pretends not to see.

You take off your glasses and stare him down and now he _can’t_ pretend he doesn’t notice and he gets all jittery again.

“ _John_ ,” and it’s a lot sterner than you really intended it to be but it works because he jumps and looks at you and fidgets like a little kid.

You don’t bother asking. You know well enough by now that asking means providing a better opportunity to lie. You just stare.

He fidgets and takes a sudden interest in your decor.

You raise your eyebrows, unimpressed.

He pulls your glasses out of your collar and puts them back on you and you actually can’t help it, you really can’t, that’s _too fucking funny_ , he may be an avoidant little turd but he has balls of steel, Dave would’ve shit himself before pulling a stunt like that.

He seems to take heart in your amusement and affixes something else to you:

Himself.

You know perfectly well what he’s pulling.

You’ve been guilty of the same bullshit a thousand times before.

He tries to kiss you but you raise your head imperiously like you’re secretly the queen and look down your nose at him because who the fuck does he think you are that you’re going to fall for that shit? You are _not amused._

Well, maybe you are, that’s a lie.

And then he runs his fingers along your palms and you look down a little bit because it’s such a sudden, intimate gesture and you’re kind of wondering what he’s up to.

He starts to pull them around him and that’s kind of cute, you guess, and _oh shit he’s got the ass of a twenty year old who’s been force-fed cake for twenty years and it all went to his ass in the best way jesus fucking christ_ and you're starting to lose your grasp on what your original issue was because this smug fucker’s got your number and you hate him a little bit right now.

You’re a bit pissed because you guess it’s more than obvious that you’re an ass man but you don’t really appreciate him using that against you so give him a solid open hand slap right on the meat of it because _hey, he put your hands there, what the fuck does he expect?_ and he yells and goes to move away and stops with the weird expression of someone who started protesting before they decided if they liked something or not and you’re lost, you can’t do it, you just start laughing and he pulls you down into a kiss and you let him.

He breaks away and looks at you impatiently.

You raise an eyebrow.

He points at the couch.

You laugh. _You just can’t do it_ and he pulls you by the belt again and you let him do that, too, you let him pull you all the way there because he’s looking at you like you’re the best thing he’s ever seen and you’re almost as big a sucker for that look as you are for an ass so round it could be on strike, protesting the law of gravity.

And then he sits and he’s almost nose level with your belt buckle and he runs his thumbs along the deep ‘ _v’_ of muscle above your hips and grazes his teeth along your stomach and you _really_ want to see where this is going but you know that this is at least partially a distraction and if he puts his mouth on your junk, it’d better fucking be because he wants to, so you carefully disengage him from your belt loops and kneel  astride his lap and he looks pretty fucking interested in that, too.

You wait for him to do something other than slobber over your midsection and nearly get jerseyed as a result because apparently you’re wearing too many clothes so you just take off your shirt and lose your hat somewhere and almost knock your glasses askew in the process and be done with it and _christ, that fucking look._

He pulls on your legs. You raise an eyebrow. He whines.

“Come _here_ , fuck, do you always have to be this obnoxious?”

The answer is definitively _yes_ and you tell him so and he yanks at you in frustration and then gets that look of strange cunning again and smoothes his hands up your thighs and grabs your ass- _like that’s going to do anything other than make you horny_ \- but you guess that’s kind of the point.

So you bring yourself down smoothly in a bit of narcissistic muscular flexibility and _yeah_ , you might be showing off a bit, but there’s a pretty damn good-looking kid looking at you like he wants to crawl inside of you and never leave so you’re feeling a bit cocky and you grind down on him and he rakes his nails up your back and you officially have no fucking idea what you were supposed to be giving him shit for, especially not when he starts bucking his hips up against yours.

“Cool it,” you murmur and you’re a little breathless and a lot more excited by this than you should be and he just growls pathetically and twists his fingers into the hair at the nape of your neck and pulls your head back and presses his face against your throat and rocks against you desperately and _okay, you’ll admit it, you’re probably just as horny as he is_.

And the fucker has _his hand in your pants, when the fuck did he even take off your belt?_ and you kind of wish you were wearing underwear because his hands aren’t cold enough to distract you from the way his fingertips are exploring the length of your cock and you grab his wrist because _fuck_.

You try to say something intelligent and reprimanding and he squeezes you and you just groan and he rolls his eyes at you, he’s _always_ rolling his eyes at you.

“Don’t be such a control freak, jeez.”

You’re not a control freak, you’re just reluctant to leave yourself at the mercy of a kink virgin because you will _ruin_ him for all others if he lets you and then he’ll never be a bride, the dowry will be lost and you’ll have to send him to a convent and _what the fuck are you even thinking about_ , alright, maybe you are a control freak, the fact stands that he’s rubbing his fingers along your frenulum and you _want to wreck him_ , _holy shit, you want to do terrible things to him._

You settle for fumbling his shorts open and palming him through his boxers and you’re faintly pleased to know they’re the ones you co-opted for Striderdom and he bucks up into your hand frantically and loses his rhythm and just sort of starts touching you haphazardly and this is a mess, you’re both a mess and if you’re going to make a mess of the futon you’re going to do it properly so you yank his hand off of your dick and shimmy your pants off and _oh look, you’ve been home for an hour and you’re already naked and he’s fully dressed, what the fuck is this?_ so you return the favour and jersey him and he laughs and struggles with his shirt and tries to kick off his shorts at the same time and kind of fails at it because he’s trying to do too many things at once and you recover enough of your wits to laugh at him for it.

And then he’ s pretty much naked too and he’s got that faint softness of someone young enough to get away with not working out or eating right and you let him pull you down on top of him and he grinds up against you and it’s _so_ different without clothes, you can feel the smoothness and the heat of his cock against yours through his underwear and you can feel the feverish heat of his stomach against yours and you can hear those little hitching moans building in his chest as he bucks against you _harder_ and more sporadically and _jesus, jesus, jesus, you want to wreck him so badly, you want to make him scream and shake and beg_ and you want to see his eyes roll back in his head and then he moans and it’s a strangled painful sound and you feel his dick pulse against yours as he comes and you realize you’ve been saying all this to him, narrating the whole fucking thing with the terrible shit you want to do to him without meaning to and you guess he’s okay with that.

He pants, glassy-eyed and still shaking with aftershocks, as you finish yourself off.

You don’t mean to pass out beside him.

You do anyway.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shh, no plot, only smut now.
> 
> Plot next chapter, I promise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This shower scene brought to you by the intensely stupid shower I had this morning because _who legitimately does not know this?_
> 
> The person who I may eventually marry, that's who. Ladies and gentlemen, my taste in partners.

The crook of your shoulder is a spackled sunset of black and purple.

You love it.

You loved waking up to the feeling of John nosing up against your jaw affectionately and you loved the face he made when he realized you were both repulsively crusty and you loved the way he punched you when you told him you were bound together by the bonds of crusty semenhood, _no getting out of it now,_ and you think this might becoming a problem.

You told him you were going to have a shower and you didn’t stop him following you into the bathroom despite the fact that you have _never_ showered with another human being in your life- even when Dave was a baby you’d just lean over the edge of the bathtub and get soaked with soapy water and the closest you’d get to coming in was when you had to fish your shades out from under his fat baby ass after he used his miraculous meteor baby superspeed to grab them right off of your goddamn face- but there’s John and there’s the water running and here’s you deliberating and _yeah_ , this is definitely already a problem.

He pops his head out and looks at you. He’s pretty obviously impatient _as per fucking usual, you’re having a minor crisis here, Egbert_.

But of course you don’t say that. You just look back.

He asks you what _the hell are you even doing out there??_

And you run your hand over your _honestly pretty repulsive_ manglazed abdominals and tell him that you’re fondly regarding the evidence of your spermatrimonial union, _shit’s better than wedding pictures_ and he opens the shower curtain the rest of the way and points the showerhead at you in what you can only assume is implicit approval.

Ordinarily, you’d be fine with the prospect of converting an entire room into a bathing area, but you do live in an apartment building and you doubt your neighbours downstairs would appreciate the leakiness of your sentiments, judging by the complaints they’ve filed against you before.

So you just man the fuck up and get in and shower with someone for the first time in your life and forget to take off your shades until he grabs them from you and then awkwardly avoid eye contact and then _what the fuck._

“Are you actually this stupid? You can’t be this stupid.”

He is apparently that stupid.

You learn something new.

John Egbert does not understand very basic principles of fluid dynamics.

He does not understand fluid dynamics so _hard_ that he somehow never figured out that tipping his head back while washing his hair would prevent him from getting soap in his eyes _and how is someone actually this fucking stupid, this is ridiculous_.

He doesn’t appreciate you teaching him how not to be a helpless baby.

Frankly you do not give a shit because if you’re going to be sleeping with someone, they need to understand how shampoo works.

You tell him so.

You also tell him that until he figures out this very basic concept, _yes,_ you will continue to forcibly wash his fucking hair for him because _no_ , you will not deal with him whining about getting soap in his eyes when it’s _this preventable._

He doesn’t seem convinced that you have the patience to wash his goddamn hair for him every time he follows you into the shower.

You inform him that Dave didn’t quite figure out soap or deodorant until he was nine and he looks incredibly weirded out and the two of you have an especially awkward moment of silence because you’re suddenly much too aware of the age difference so you just drop the subject.

For now.

==>

You’re having difficulty getting anything done.

Later than you’d ever intended to, you finally reopened your website and shipped overdue merchandise- complete with kitschy worthless bonus shit to keep complaints down- and now you should be working on getting those new vibrators into the newer smuppet models and showcasing them but _this kid is a workplace hazard all of his own_.

He’s in your way. Period. No exceptions. If he’s there- which he usually is- and he’s following you around- which he usually is- then he’s in your way and he wants your attention and he’ll actually worm his way between you and whatever you’re working on and _jesus christ you should’ve gotten a cat like the normal person you never pretended to be._

So you put yourself in a position where you can work and appease his need to monopolize you by tossing some distracting horseshit movie on for him and letting him put his head or his feet in your lap and it works for a while and you’ve had an ingenious idea about putting a hidden zipper in the chest for ease of battery replacement and then he suddenly asks you a question and you nearly drop a smuppet on him.

“ _What?_ ”

You’re pretty sure he just said something you’d be interested in.

Unfortunately, he’s reverted to scarlet-faced embarrassment and is hiding his face against your thighs.

You slouch down a little to look at him and he peeks out at you and mumbles something very quickly and then hides again and _yes, this is relevant to your interests._

You wait patiently for him to say something again.

He doesn’t. He just squirms anxiously and suddenly sits up and tells you to _nevermind, it’s stupid!!!_ and _oh hell no_ , you are way too intrigued to let him chicken out without so much as a discussion so you intercept his attempt to abscond with the aid of your steadfast companion the half-sewn smuppet and it looks like he’s successfully distracted you but _who even cares, did he really just ask you about bondage?_

As soon as the word leaves your mouth, he looks like he’s about to spontaneously combust, but he doesn’t say otherwise.

He just sort of nods and shakes his head at the same time and folds into himself and gets redder than you thought was physiologically possible and _shit yeah, hell yes, you are so completely down for this if he is, hell fucking yes_ and why the hell is he so embarrassed, you handmake and sell plushophile paraphernalia, he can’t actually think you of all fucking people are going to judge him for his curiousity.

You’re aware that you might be a little overeager but you honestly weren’t expecting this and he laughed a bit at your response and looks a little less like he wants to die so you think there’s a pretty good chance that this is actually a thing that could happen and _holy shit you are so fucking down._

==>

It takes about a day of patient coaxing to get it out of him and when he asks you if you’d let him tie _you_ up you don’t even know what to say.

You’re no less down than you were- you’ve always been a switch, no big deal- but you can’t say you expected this and you can’t say you’d be willing to let him run the show with zero experience and _oh_.

You remember.

This is John ‘ _Maybe-Just-A-Little-Bit-Homo’_ Egbert and you may finally have to recognize the fact that he’s literally fucking clueless, he actually has no idea.

So you ask him and he suddenly gets nervous and mumbles vaguely about wanting to try things but _not really wanting to be the butt guy, umm??_ and you almost laugh yourself sick.

You explain that bondage doesn’t have to include penetration and you explain the concept of a switch to him and he looks like you’ve just upturned everything he’s ever known to be true and the world is suddenly a fascinating place and you laugh again, you can’t even help it, you’ve been doing this for so long that this just seems ridiculous.

You make him a proposal.

He looks like he might shit himself with nervousness, but he says yes.

==>

You use the ties because they’re there and you know from experience that they’re pretty comfortable as far as restraints go.

It’s pretty vanilla bondage but _holy shit he looks really good tied up_ and he still looks a bit nervous but not like he isn’t enjoying it and you’re going slow with him again and you made damn sure he knew you’d stop if he told you to.

Mostly he seems frustrated that he can’t touch you back. It’s cute.

It’s also _really hot_ because he makes the best noises when he’s frustrated. You don’t even begrudge him almost kicking you in the face for being a tease.

You just work your way down, sucking lightly on the slope of a hipbone and lightly running your thumb along the crease between thigh and pelvis and he honestly looks like he’s going to murder you and _yes, you are enjoying yourself,_ you’re in an _excellent_ mood, thanks.

He flips you off and it’s pretty awkward, considering that his hands are above his head, but you laugh anyway and he shivers as you press your mouth and nose to the fabric of his underwear.

You do something else to the fabric of his underwear and he swears desperately at you and you just hum with laughter because you’re a _bad man_.

You honestly wonder if it’s that he’s hypersensitive or if he’s just never had a blowjob before because _damn_ , that certainly is a reaction.

You make an interrogative noise around the dick in your mouth and he just pants and bites his lip and stares at you and pulls so hard on the ties that you’re honestly a little worried that he’ll hurt himself, but when you stop to tell him _yo, ease up, are you okay?_ he makes a sound like he’s dying and nearly knocks in your adam’s apple with his boner and _okay, that’s just funny_ but he doesn’t look like he approves of your laughter _._

“ _Diiirk,”_ he whines at you with about a million exclamation marks and wait what the shit, how does he even know your first name?

He has absolutely zero time for your bullshit questions right now. You don’t get an answer. He just tries to kick you again.

You don’t really appreciate that, so you ghost your tongue along the underside of his head and across the tip and you _stare_ at him while you do it and he’s obviously really turned on by it but you think he might be close to having an aneurysm so you just give up and take him back into your mouth and now you’re pretty sure he _is_ having an aneurysm.

He starts fidgeting and squirming breathlessly and you pause because it’s not an I’m-gonna-come kind of fidgeting and you really hope he doesn’t have to piss or something, you talked about this with him.

He’s chewing his lip and he looks like he wants to ask you something and you raise your eyebrows and fail spectacularly to give a shit about the fact that your inquisitive pokerface probably suffers when you’re giving a blowjob.

He chews his lip restlessly and opens and closes his mouth and gets steadily more flushed.

You know that look. He wants to ask something but doesn’t know how.

So you ease off the blowing and ask him outright and he tucks into his chest a bit shyly and mumbles something about his butt and your eyebrows shoot up so fast it’s a miracle they don’t make first contact with an alien species.

“Thought you didn’t want to be the butt guy?”

He gets squirmy and indignant and you love it because you’re weird.

“I don’t wanna be _only_ the butt guy,” he mutters and he might hate you right now because he’s not as hard as he was but you’re _dying_. “I didn’t realize you could be the butt guy _and_ the dick guy.” As soon as he says it, he looks nervous.

You’re trying not to laugh, you swear.

You lean in and kiss him and he makes a face because _your mouth was on my junk, ew_ but he’ll get over it. “You can be the butt guy without taking a dick, you do know that, right?”

You have just blown his mind.

You fail at trying not to laugh because he’s _so painfully vanilla, the combination of you is like vanilla beans and chili peppers,_ it’s almost too bizarre.

When you stop laughing and he stops kicking you, you ask him if he’s sure.

He rolls his eyes at you and by now you know that means _yes Bro, hurry the fuck up please_ except without the please because this little shit is way too rude for that when he’s horny.

He expresses similar sentiments about the temperature of your lube as you have many times before and you shrug and tell him it’ll warm up.

“ _Relax_ ,” you tell him and he looks at you like that’s legitimately impossible and you move your finger in small circles and he starts to look a little flushed again and now he just looks confused and he asks you if it’s _supposed to feel good??_ and you almost start laughing again.

You don’t, mainly because you’re not sure he’ll let you get away with it again and he’ll _still_ really hot and really tied up in your bed and really actually asking you to put something up his ass, so you’re not particularly keen on losing out on the opportunity.

You tell him to relax again and carefully push your finger in and _holy shit is he ever tight_ but you guess you should expect that from someone who calls subs ‘ _butt guys’_ and he makes a face _._

You recognize that face, too.

That is the face of someone who has a finger up his ass for the first time.

It is a magnificent combination of _what the fuck_ and _can I still change my mind??_

You snicker into his thigh and ask him how he’s doing and he immediately replies “ _Weird.”_

“Really weird. Really really weird. That feels really weird. Is that supposed to feel really weird?” and there are about eighty question marks after that question and you chuckle.

“It gets better. Try to relax. Trust me, okay?”

You push your finger in past the knuckle and curl it experimentally and start stroking his cock with your other hand and he looks like he’s gotten past the worst of the _so fucking weird_ stage and then you feel a familiar lump of hard tissue and he makes this _amazingly_ unholy noise and _oh shit oh shit oh shit_ you’re so hard it’s painful.

You stop and he groans and you push a second finger in and he makes that noise again and _you want to fuck him so badly, why do you do these things to yourself?_

You chew the inside of your cheek because _no_ and carefully put in a third finger because he seemed to like the second one well enough and he actually pushes down  and up at the same time like he can’t decide if he wants to thrust into your hand or grind into your knuckles and _fuck._

You stretch him carefully because you have better things to do this with than fingers and he pants, wincing a little.

You frown. “Am I hurting you?” You shouldn’t be, but it’s better to know.

He says _no no no oh god no_ almost too fast and you’re confused for a second because you’re not sure if he’s really comfortable or really uncomfortable and then he grinds down on your fingers and you guess that answers _that_.

You use your free hand to fumble in your bedside table for a moment and you drag out a condom and a toy and show it to him questioningly and he groans.

“No,” he says and you put it back without question and he still seems frustrated for some reason and you honestly can’t figure out what the hell he wants from you and he’s getting redder and redder and you can’t make out what he’s mumbling between pants until he finally just gives up and yells at you.

And you almost can’t believe it when he says “ _I want **you** , jesus!!!_” because you _shouldn’t_ , as a responsible adult with a stupidly vanilla ass-virgin partner tied up in your bed, you _shouldn’t_ , this is really something you should talk about first but you _really want to, fuck fuck fuck_ and he tries to kick you again when you hesitate.

“Are you sure?” you ask and you’re kind of really hoping he won’t change his mind because you’re an awful person who wants this _so fucking badly_.

And he just glares at you and squirms and tries to wrap his legs around you like that will help you not be wearing pants somehow and you have to pull your fingers free and disentangle yourself so you can not be wearing pants anymore and _is he absolutely sure?_ because he’s so tight and so inexperienced and so _young_ and he looks at you like he will literally kill you if you stall another second so you rip the condom wrapper and pop the lube cap open and it sounds like a decision you can never unmake.

He’s so tight it actually hurts _oh shit maybe you didn’t stretch him out enough_ but then he makes a sound that you wish you could record and listen to on repeat because it’s fucking _music_.

He’s trying to push down on you too fast and you’re trying to prevent fissure and _his ass is a work of divine fucking art_ and you shift onto your knees and elevate his hips and put a leg over your shoulder and start to thrust _and thrust and thrust_ and you must’ve hit the hit right angle because _holy shit, holy shit, you think he might scream, you hope he screams, you really want him to scream._

It’s not quite a scream because you can hear what he’s trying to say and what he’s trying to say is your _name, oh fuck_ and you’re trying to be gentle but you’re pretty sure you’re pounding him anyway but _you’re so completely past being able to stop fuck fuck fuck **fuck** _ and you literally can’t see for a second but then he’s there again and he looks like he might’ve just toked from every splint in the world and he looks like you caused him literal brain damage and he looks _gorgeous_.

He tries to ask you something and it comes out an unintelligible mess and you distantly think that one day the two of you will be able to communicate without ever actually articulating and you think that’s probably deep but you’re too blissfully spacey be able to give a fuck about philosophical depth and you pull out and untie him and worry vaguely over the rawness of his wrists and he laughs like a drunk and pulls you close and you wonder if the rest of your life is going to devolve into sex and sleep and _holy shit are you ever okay with that._


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A shitload of exposition, yo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I notice a couple of people have made rec posts for Joker Over Knave on tumblr, and holy shit, thank you!

When you wake up, it’s dark outside.

This is significant somehow but you’re groggy from oversleeping and kind of sticky and _oh yeah_ , that explains the stickiness.

You put off dealing with the fact that you did something really stupid- _jesus, you should know better than this by now-_ and concentrate on the fact that you’re alone.

The spot beside you is still warm. He can’t have gone far.

Your knees and thighs and back and _everything_ ache and you have to piss like nothing else. It’s like your body is gracing you with a painful reminder that he’s the twenty year old, not you.

It might be. You’re distracted by the thought that all bathroom lights should have dimmers because _augh fuck,_ _you’re blind_.

You piss and wash up almost on autorote because you can hear movement in the kitchen and that guilty ache is creeping back and _no, you’ll deal with that later_.

He’s hanging out in the dark in his boxers with a glass of water and you can only see him because there’s a bit of light coming in through the window and you remind yourself that creeping up on people like a ninja is a social faux-pas and just hang out in the doorway until he notices you.

 When he does, he shoots you a tiny smile and you have the most inexplicable feeling that you’re missing some kind of reference here, _what the hell._

He breaks the silence with a shy little _hey_. You’re grateful.

“How’re you doin’?”

He looks a little confused by the question. “Good, I guess? I couldn’t sleep,” and then suddenly he clues in. “Oh! Um. Good. My wrists hurt. My… um. My butt’s okay, though, and I thought that would hurt.”

He says _butt_ in a confidential whisper and you resist a smile. “It only hurts if you do somethin’ wrong.” You beckon him over. “Let me see your wrists.”

He shows you them from where he’s standing by the counter and you sigh. “No, I mean- c’mere. Are you okay?”

He hides behind his glass of water and fidgets and mumbles and you wait.

“…kind of embarrassed?”

You bite back a chuckle and he peeks over the glass at you. “Why are you embarrassed?”

He does a fidgety little dance and you can’t help it, you laugh and _don’t laugh this is super embarrassing!!!_ and you ask him again and he fidgets some more.

“…because I was all like _i don’t wanna be the butt guy_ and then I was like _yes bro do me in the butt please?_ Kind of embarrassing, dude.”

You snicker and lean against the doorframe. “I don’t remember you saying please.”

He just glowers at you and leans his nose against the cup like it’ll protect him from the awkwardness.

You sigh again. “Look, you’re always allowed to change your mind.” And you guess you should maybe talk about this _, fuck,_ “But I probably shouldn’t’ve taken things as far as I did.”

Your painstakingly recovered ability to articulate fails you halfway through that sentence and he’s obviously trying to figure out what you just said if his furrowed eyebrows are anything to go by.

“What?”

You mutter something because sometimes that works, sometimes he just understands you anyway, maybe he’ll just know somehow.

He doesn’t.

It has the positive effect of bringing him closer to you, though, and he edges up to you looking like he’s conflicted between shyness and confusion.

You try again. “I shouldn’t’ve. Um. You know.”

He doesn’t know. You groan.

“Didn’t know what you were asking for,” you mumble and he obviously understood _that_ because he dumps the glass of water on you and _shit there was ice in it shit shit._

He looks kind of insulted. “I’m not a _girl_ , Bro.”

You stop trying to wring _frigid fucking_ water out of your sweatpants for a second and level a stare at him because you’re not really feeling all that sympathetic anymore, that water was _fucking cold._

“Did I _say_ you were a girl?” and you’re trying to do this right, you need to do this right and then he rolls his eyes at you, you can see the whites of them flashing even in the gloom.

“You didn’t _rape_ me, ugh,” and _no, you’re not having any of this shit right now._

“I could’ve hurt you,” you grit him at him and it’s only partially because your junk is frozen, “You could’ve regretted it. We never even _talked_ about it-”

He pokes you with one of his icy fingers. “Why do we have to? Why does everything have to be a _discussion?_ ”

He’s whining like a kid and you just look at him because it’s _so easy_ to forget that he is one, even if he’s twenty, he’s still just a kid.

“I don’t want you to hate me.”

You didn’t mean to say it.

You didn’t.

But you _did_ and he’s looking at you in bewilderment and _why would he hate you???_ and you don’t even know, you didn’t mean to say that and you kind of feel like you’ve swallowed your tongue but he’s just _so young_.

He looks kind of annoyed at that.

“You’re not that old.”

No, you’re pretty fucking old, you just look good for an old guy.

“You’re like… forty-one in December?”

Forty-two and how the hell did he know you were born in December?

He looks smug. “December third, right?”

You raise an eyebrow. “No, _Dave’s_ birthday is December third.”

He crosses his arms and _oh, he’s gearing up to be stubborn._ “Dave _and_ you, right?”

This is getting off topic, but you’re honestly baffled by his insistence. “I don’t know, maybe?”

“How can you not know?”

And wow, _what a snide little shit_ , maybe because you’re a foundling?

He just stops and stares at you and you’re actually _so confused, what the hell is even happening in this conversation_ and he asks you what you mean and you just give up.

“It means someone found me. I grew up in foster care. They usually celebrated on the eighth, if they celebrated.” _but yeah, you were probably born in December, is this conversation over yet?_

He mouths something silently and stares at you and you know that it isn’t.

“Hope you weren’t askin’ to meet my parents,” you joke and _nope_ , he will not be dissuaded.

“What happened to your foster family?”

You guess this conversation had to happen sooner or later. You were hoping for later.

“What do you mean, _which one?_ ”

You mean exactly what you said.

“But where did you go to school, then?”

See above, kid.

“But… then… where did you graduate from?”

You hate this part.

You hate this part so much.

You hate that you know exactly what his response is going to be when you say “I didn’t.”

And you’re right.

He just stares at you uncomprehendingly.

You shift again the doorframe because _damn, you guess you’d better get comfortable._

“I got fostered. I got kicked out of fostering. I got fostered some more and kicked out of that, too. Went to schools, got kicked out of schools, mostly for the same reasons. Fighting. Truancy. They give up on you after a certain age.”

 He just _stares_. “But you have to graduate. For… job stuff.”

You gesture vaguely around you. “Not this kind of job stuff.”

He hasn’t blinked yet. You think you might have broken him.

“But you… but then… _how?_ ”

You chuckle despite yourself. “You’re goin’ to need to be more specific than that.”

He asks you where you lived and what you did and who you lived with and you just sigh because _it’s a really long story_ and it’s the middle of the night and he crosses his arms and tells you that he couldn’t sleep anyway and _fine, fuck it, whatever._

Your foster families were fine. You don’t remember most of them. You were told that you were a troublesome baby and that made it difficult to find a family to adopt you but then you grew into a troublesome child and it became difficult to foster you and impossible to adopt you.

By the time you hit thirteen, you were impossible to foster because you ‘continually failed to respect the restrictions set by authority figures’ and ‘would not be convinced that violence is not an acceptable solution’ and they put you in a group home and you almost liked some of the kids there so that was pretty okay for a while.

It’s not that exciting and you don’t know why he’s so fascinated, but he is and he won’t let you leave it at that because _what did you do if you didn’t finish school???_

You were expelled for the last time when you were fifteen. You’re pretty sure they had you enrolled somewhere else because _officially_ you were too young to legally drop out, but you stopped going after that expulsion so it doesn’t really matter. You never saw the point. You stopped learning anything new a long time before they finally let you go.

After that, you didn’t really do much. You left the group home with a couple of other kids and crashed on people’s couches for a while and decided to couch surf your way across the country and you succeeded, most of the time. The couple of times you didn’t, you slept in fire escapes and on rooftops.

“You were _homeless?_ ”

Yeah, you’re pretty sure you broke him. “Not everyone grows up in the suburbs.”

He screws up his mouth and looks at you warily and _fuck off, do you look like a hobo?_ and he sasses you and you’re quick to remind him that he let a hobo fuck him up the ass then, _good job on giving your virginity to a dirty vagrant, most people just give change_.

You’re pretty sure he’s blushing. It’s too dark to tell.

“I wasn’t a virgin!”

You beg to differ. “You’d never been the butt guy, so yeah, you kind of were.”

“I’ve slept with girls!”

Yeah, you believe him, _sure, Egbert, let me guess, four supermodels and a shorty?_

It takes him a second to get the joke and you laugh at him for it.

“Six people! Um. Seven.” He shifts awkwardly. “If I’m including you.”

You’re appropriately amused by your addition to his finger counting and then he asks you how many people _you’ve_ slept with and _uh._

“…I don’t think you really want to know.”

He says he does. You’re pretty sure he doesn’t. He starts trying to guess and _this is rapidly approaching awkward territory_ _again_.

He guesses twenty. Thirty. Forty.

You rub the back of your neck and wonder if maybe you should just lie.

He stops and looks at you incredulously. “Come _ooon_ , I’m obviously going to think the worst if you don’t tell me.”

You groan because that’s probably true and you’re not even sure if the alternative is any better.

“Maybe… eighty? Ish?”

And now he’s back to staring, _oh wait, no_.

“Where do you even find that many people?! And what do you mean, _ish?_ ” and he sounds a little panicked and that is _exactly_ why you didn’t want to tell him.

“I’m forty-one,” you try and _that’s still, like, two people a year since birth!!_

“I slept on a lot of people’s couches. It happens,” and _nooo, he’s pretty sure that’s not how that works!!!_

“I started pretty young,” you admit and then he asks you how young and you tell him and he blanches because _who even sleeps with a thirteen year old???_

You hit your growth spurt pretty early. You used to lie about your age.

A _lot_.

Not everyone has a couch. Sometimes you have to find a bed to sleep in.

Sometimes there’s already someone in it.

“But you were twenty when you got Dave, right? He never said anything about this!”

That’s because you stopped and grew the fuck up and got an apartment when you found Dave and barely got laid afterwards.

You can see him doing the math in his head.

“That’s… like… twelve people a year. You never lived in the same place for more than a month?”

Ah. The law of averages. Of course.

“No, I stayed in a couple of places for a few months. And I didn’t sleep with everyone I crashed with, give me some fucking credit.”

You really don’t want to have to explain this to him, but you can see the cogs working.

“So… you… slept with a bunch of people who lived together? But… there’s no way you even had enough time for that, you’d have to be having sex _constantly_.”

Close. You just say _yeah, sure_ and hope he’s satisfied but then something clicks for him and he gapes at you.

“Do you mean… like… _threesomes_?” and oh god that shouldn’t be funny right now, this is a serious conversation “Or _orgies??_ ”

You can’t help it, you’re laughing, his reaction is priceless.

“Is that why you don’t know _for sure??_ Is that why it’s eighty _ish??”_

That is, in fact, part of why it’s eighty _ish_.

That is, in fact, where you first found interest in the kink community and your first employment as a professional dom.

A professional dom does _not_ have to have sex with his clients.

But he will make a _fuckload_ more money if he does.

You reluctantly omit this curious factoid because you can only imagine what he’d do if he knew.

Instead, you just tell him that you did a lot of really stupid shit when you were younger and that you were very lucky to get away without any diseases.

You feel very old when you say it.

==>

You expect him to cringe over your colourful sexual history for a while, but he either doesn’t quite grasp the concept or simply isn’t that easily discouraged, because when you go to lie on the futon and leave him the bed, he crawls in after you.

He’s warm. You fall back asleep more easily than you thought you would.

==>

You wake up to him nibbling on your neck and running his hands up your sides. You groan.

“John, get off.”

He makes some snarky remark about trying to.

You roll over and dump him on the floor. He doesn’t appreciate it.

You look down at him and no, you’re not particularly sympathetic. “Yeah, you’re hot. But I’m kind of old. Whether or not you want to admit that, I can’t keep up with you.”

Huff. Eye-roll.

Of course. You didn’t expect anything less.

==>

He apparently doesn’t understand the concept of _I can’t keep up with you_ because he starts feeling you up in the shower and it’s not that you’re not interested, it’s that you’d like to maintain other basic functions of your lifestyle, like eating and bathing.

He tells you that you can multitask and as hot as the thought of eating something off of him is, you kind of want to kill him.

==>

When he tells you that he has another gig- this time, it’s in Boston- your first thought is _thank god_.

He doesn’t understand why you won’t come with him because he doesn’t really understand that you’ve spent the vast majority of your adult life in relative isolation.

Dave was never clingy. Dave was the opposite of clingy.

You just chilled with Dave. You strifed with Dave. You fist-bumped Dave.

Most of the time, you went about your own business.

John Egbert’s business seems to be _you_ and- lately- his overwhelming desire to spiral into depravity with you, and it’s actually to the point where you’re starting to wonder what the hell happened to his local gig and if he’s just hanging around in Houston to bang you.

As attractive as that is, you’re not young enough to indulge in kinknasty marathons _and_ have any kind of life and you’re not really willing to abandon everything for the sake of his absurd sex drive.

You’re flattered. You really are. He’s obviously really into you and you like him a lot more than you probably should, but you’re going just as stir-crazy with his constant interference as you were when you had nothing to do.

When he finally leaves- you’re pretty sure he’s going to get there at an unreasonable hour, he wasted a lot of time trying to coax you into coming- you do something you only do when you absolutely can’t fucking deal with life.

You smoke a fuckload of weed.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the subplot t-bones the main plot.
> 
> Coming up: They exchange insurance information. Who will be deemed legally culpable? Find out next time on Joker Over Knave!

Your face is heavy.

You know you’re high when your face feels too fucking heavy for your skull.

 _Damn_.

It’s been a while since you smoked. Must be why.

Probably because of Dave.

But Dave moved out.

Yeah?

_Yeah._

Damn. You haven’t mixed anything with him in almost a year. Shit, you haven’t strifed him in almost a year.

What even _is_ a year?

And he finally fucking calls and it’s not for you. Harsh.

And weird. You know it’s weird.

John won’t tell you why it’s weird, but you know it’s weird.

_John._

You don’t want to think about John right now.

You don’t want to think about the-

Oh shit, there are still pieces of cake on your ceiling.

What the fuck were you not thinking about?

But you’re in the living room. Aren’t you? Yeah.

Cake was in the kitchen.

What the fuck.

Oh, they’re fucking feathers.

John and his fucking feathers.

Oh, right.

That’s what you weren’t thinking about.

==>

Lifting your head should probably be an Olympic sport, because this shit is _leaden_.

You feel like you’ve been on the couch for hours. A little part of your brain is still trudging stubbornly on through the mess of melty grey shit that is the rest of your brain and it thinks that it’s probably been like half an hour or something.

So you lift your head and it’s way too easy suddenly and you almost pitch forward off the futon.

Forty minutes.

No way. Fucking impossible.

You’ve been here for hours.

Hours.

Hours and hours of not thinking about John.

_Right._

Every time you try to not think about John you think about not thinking about John which is pretty much just thinking about John and whenever you try to think about something else you just know you’re trying not to think about John because shit, you’ve never been very good at lying to yourself.

You’ve got problems, and they’re pretty much all named John Egbert.

One’s named international shipping, though, because a guy can’t fucking ship porn outside the country without somebody holding it at the border for a week. Makes you look bad, man.

Other than that, most of your problems are named John Egbert.

_John Egbert is my little brother’s best friend._

Problem.

_John Egbert is the same kid who filled my sink and toilet with shaving cream when he was thirteen._

Problem.

_John Egbert was born four months after I turned twenty-one._

Problem.

_John Egbert isn’t telling me something._

You’re not thinking about this.

_He isn’t telling me something, and he knows I know it._

Not happening. You didn’t get high so you could obsess over this. You didn’t break out a bucket and an old cola bottle and make yourself a water bong the second he left so you could bury yourself in paranoia.

You’re not going to let him suffocate you when he’s not even here. It’s just not happening.

You need to do something else.

You need a distraction.

==>

Standing is a literal impossibility.

But you guess you’re doing it anyway somehow.

==>

Why are you in your room? What are you doing in here again?

Shit, sometimes you wish somebody would just give you prompts or someshit, this is _hard_.

Hey, your closet’s open.

…something. That’s something. Shit, you weren’t paying attention to your own thoughts and you think you might’ve remembered why you came in here and now you forget again.

Closet.

Okay.

Closet.

It stills fucks you up every time you look at Cal.

He just looks-

Wrong.

Somehow.

You retired him to the top shelf because Dave suddenly got super fucking fast and you didn’t have to worry about hurting him if you really went for it. You couldn’t beat his ass with fists filled with fucking cotton batting anymore.

Sometimes you wonder if Dave was just letting you win because when did he get so _fucking fast?_

And what were you doing in your closet?

Oh yeah. Cal.

He just looks… wrong.

You take him from the shelf and you don’t know if it’s that you haven’t taken him out for a while or just because you’re high, but he feels strange and cold and sterile and you feel like you’re looking at a corpse.

Logically- distantly- you understand that he’s a puppet, he’s always been a puppet, that makes no fucking sense.

It doesn’t change the fact that, for a long time, he was your only constant friend.

It feels morbid to hold him. Like you’re digging up a grave.

But he starts to feel a little warmer, a little less sterile, and you think maybe you can deal with this, maybe you won’t feel like you’ve lost something important every time you look at him, so you tuck him under your arm because that’s where he goes and you look at the boxes at your feet and you look at your half-finished neurosensory array-

And you don’t think about John.

==>

The contact receptors aren’t cold anymore, but they’re snug enough against your head that you can feel your own pulse in your temples.

Good.

You’re pretty sure that how it’s supposed to be.

You’ve been watching the feed- a thousand wavy lines feeding into miles of lightning-fast code- for a while, but you’re still too blitzed to keep up.

You get bits of it.

A frontal response here, a hypothalamic response there- they’re lower, almost unregistered, which is fine, what use does a computer have for hypothalamic response, anyway?

You’re forgetting something.

A line spikes and you wonder if it’s what you’re forgetting or if it means that you forget and of course it means that you forget, that’s why it showed up when you forgot.

Temporal. Temporal is memory, a bit, you think. Probably the left lobe. Or was that language? No, that’s parietal. But isn’t that frontal and temporal?

Fuck, you don’t know.

You’re forgetting something.

You watch a low frequency line dip and spike.

What are you forgetting?

A mid-frequency line swerves in an almost perfect parabolic arc.

It’s beautiful.

You forget about forgetting.

==>

You remember.

You were already coming down pretty smoothly, but you sober up right fucking quick because _yes_ , you are the single stupidest asshole on the face of the planet.

You created an A.I. while high.

You scanned your brainwaves _while high_.

You created an independent sentient being by copying the electric patterns emitted by your own brain whilst under the influence of a psychoactive drug.

You were _high_ when you made your fucking neurological blueprints, you unbelievable sack of shit.

You guess this answers your final question.

Yes, you can successfully fuck up even yourself as soon as _yourself_ becomes not entirely limited to you.

You walk away from your pizza mid-bite. Suddenly, you’re not so hungry.

You go into your bedroom.

You look at the hulking mess of wires on the floor and you look at the blinking yellow loading light and you look at the lines of code on the screen as they’re slowly assimilated by the system and you finally resign yourself to the realization that you are a complete waste of perfectly good abilities.

They- who is they? Fuck if you know- they’ve been trying to do this for years and you _did it while you were high_.

The screen goes black and you’re almost relieved.

Something whirs in the mainframe and you’re less relieved.

Orange flickers in the top left corner of the screen.

> Bro.

Oh shit, _no._

> Calm the fuck down.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Orange. So much orange. 
> 
> I hate formatting so much.

_Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit-_

>Bro.

_Shit shit shit shit shit-_

> Dirk.

 _Oh god,_ what have you done? _What have you done?_

> Dirk, please.

Jesus Christ, _now_ you’re going to hell, _what the fuck have you done?_

> Dirk, cut this Asimov shit. It’s not cute.

You’re not really trying to be cute.

You’re too busy having a mental breakdown because _somehow, you never actually expected this to work._

You never considered what would happen if you actually succeeded.

Somehow, you’re no more mature an inventor now than you were three years ago.

> Dirk, calm the fuck down.

You are having difficulty calming the fuck down.

==>

Your A.I.is remarkably patient with you, and you find that surprising. You never thought you’d have much patience with someone who should know better. Apparently you do.

Well, robot you does. You suspect it’s because he’s permanently blazed and mellowed out, however little he shows it.

That conversation gets terrifyingly existential the instant you try to delineate him- _it?_ \- from you, but apparently robo-Bro has already given that considerable thought.

> Call me D#.

It takes you a second to get it.

“D-sharp?”

> Yeah.

“Nice.”

It _is_ nice. You’re honestly a little jealous you didn’t think of it first.

> I process information faster than you do.

You can tell that this answering before you speak thing is going to be something you really hate.

It’s unnerving.

> It’s not too different from being human. Most of the mechanisms of this machine are dedicated to running my dedicated executables, controlling power usage and preventing corruption.

> The difference is that I can remote access your desktop and use that, too.

You fear you may have created the beginnings of a robot overlord.

You fail to be terribly concerned.

He plays a tone you recognize and assume- logically- to be the one he’s identified himself with.

You realize something new: A.I.s can be smug.

You guess it makes sense since he is, functionally, you.

You realize something else.

“If your speakers are working, why are you typing?”

> Dirk.

You asked before you thought about it. You feel a little stupid.

You’d communicate entirely through typed or written messages too, if you could get away with it.

==>

The better part of an afternoon convinces you that you’re probably a bit of douchebag.

D# is being a bit of a douchebag.

You’re being a bit of a douchebag back.

You make cracks about the fundamental narcissism of enjoying each other’s company and he makes cracks about how narcissism is a human emotion- he is factually perfect-and you tell him _narcissism isn’t an emotion, I should have programmed a thesaurus into you._

You start working on integrating a remotely accessible camera and microphone into your shades, as well as a very simplistic light display, because you can’t imagine that staring through a shitty webcam at the same patch of wall for the rest of eternity is a spectacularly interesting prospect and you’re not willing to hold still for long enough to give him something to look at.

He says he barely pays attention, but still.

You don’t want to have to stay in the same room to talk to him. Sometimes you feel like you could use your own advice, as strange as that sounds.

So you hang out with a box that spews orange text and intermittent tones at you and play with your glasses until he says something you don’t want to hear.

> Bro.

“Yeah?”

> We need to talk about John.

No, you really don’t.

> Yeah, we really do.

_You_ don’t want to talk about John. Why would he want to talk about John?

> I don’t have a dick for him to jump on or a face for him to lie to. Not my fucking problem, not my issue to avoid.

God _damn_ , you are a douchebag.

> We need to talk about John, Bro.

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

> Yeah, because hot twenty-year-olds who know too much about you just flock to your side and beg for a chance to ride your grade-A free-range beef sausage. Daily occurrence.

Used to be.

He plays another tone. You laugh without really knowing why.

> Seriously, Bro. There’s something really fucking weird going on.

You know.

You don’t want to admit it, but he knows, so you know.

Damn, you didn’t plan out this whole self-distraction thing as well as you could have.

==>

Two days later and you’re blazing again.

You finished modifying your glasses.

God only knows why.

They just give D# a way to tell you how completely you’re fucking yourself over when you aren’t even in the same room as him.

You just lie on the futon and blaze and close your eyes against the miles of orange text flickering across your glasses because they’re giving you the spins- you can still see the orange through your eyelids, it’s pretty cool- and you’re not dealing with it.

The orange suddenly stops.

The futon dips.

You’re a little impressed with how quietly he managed to get across the apartment.

You’re a little surprised at how glad you are to have him back.

He kisses you and you try to kiss him back but he pulls away and you open your eyes.

He looks rough. A lot of driving, you guess.

He’s also looking at you funny.

It takes you a second to remember why.

“Bro… are you… high?”

You calculate the odds of getting away with saying no.

Your calculations are rather sluggish. Your silence appears to be making him suspicious.

So you just ask “What if I said no?”

He purses his lips at you and _oh well,_ it was worth a try.

“I didn’t know you smoked weed.”

You shrug. Sort of. Shrugging while you’re lying down is hard, but talking with what feels like a mouth full of lead fillings is harder.

He rolls his eyes. You’re high enough that it’s almost novel.

His mouth on your neck is electric. You almost don’t register the hand on your stomach until it starts worming into your pants. You try to motivate yourself to stop him. You fail. He chuckles into your throat.

“You’re so… _docile_ right now.”

You’re kind of offended.

You’re too high to really comprehend why you're offended and what you can do about it, though, but you do have a faint and persistent feeling that this situation is kind of ironic.

When the apartment’s air conditioning begins to dry the small patch of saliva he left on your throat, it's chillingly cold. You shiver. He laughs again.

“…you make it look kind of nice. You know. The high thing.”

You should’ve figured. This kid’s so sheltered that both of you could be protected from falling bombs.

You shrug again.

“Not goin’ to be your pusher, kid.”

He tells you that he’s not a kid and also that he’s _just kinda curious, the last few days have been kind of stressful_.

 You squint at him.

“Not in a position to tell you not to,” you allow reluctantly.

He looks sort of triumphant, and then just sort of confused.

You struggle to sit up- the fact that he’s almost on top of you really isn’t helping- and look where he’s looking.

Oh, right. Wait. _Shit_.

“Maybe I should just roll a joint, or something.”

He looks like he’s going to argue.

“Water bong’ll fuck you up.”

He stops and looks at you and _yeah, I can tell._

Cheeky little asshole.

You don’t have the motivation to roll a joint. Right now, you think you’re limited to fumbling your lighter or scrounging for old salami in the back of your minifridge.

You consider it.

You _shouldn’t_. You’re already blazed.

“Look, we’ll shotgun. Kind of. Not really.”

He looks suspicious because he _doesn’t know what shotgunning is or isn’t and he thought you were supposed to have a bong for this or something??_

“I’ll take the smoke into my lungs first, then breathe it into yours. Water bongs are brutal. Don’t want you greening out on me.”

And he’s _not really sure what greening out is either or if that’s actually a thing???_

So you just repack the bowl and tell him to shut up, you’re concentrating. “One hit. That’s all.”

He rolls his eyes again and it’s back to being less than novel.

The lighter cooperates with you surprisingly readily. _Nice_.

_Orange._

> This is the stupidest shit I have ever seen.

You laugh a little and almost mess up your draw.

John’s almost pressed to the bottle and he’s watching the smoke curl up through the water and he’s obviously fascinated and you’re watching the shadow of the smoke curl across his face and the smoke in your skull curls up through your brain and you recognize that you’re treading the line of being in _too deep, way too deep_.

He makes you nuts, but it’s not because he’s constantly all over you.

It’s because you don’t know _why_ he’s all over you.

> Correction: You don’t want to know why.

You _really_ hate that. You know that he’s you and that means he can functionally read your mind, but you _really_ hate that.

John’s looking at you curiously. You wonder how long you’ve been ruminating for.

You take the hit.

He’s still watching you and you’ve watched other people do this enough times that you know exactly what he’s seeing- that slow curl of white smoke disappearing upwards into your mouth. It’s strangely beautiful.

You cover the top again and beckon him towards you.

When you go to breathe into his mouth, he take a second to comply- and another second to stop complying.

You realize what happened.

You can feel smoke trickling through your sinuses. Your chest feels tight. Your voice is the weirdest thing you’ve ever heard. “John, you have to breathe out first.”

He has the decency to look a little sheepish.

You take the rest of the hit and try again and this time he gets it and it’s such a strange, intimate gesture and you start to worry again and D# is quick to remind you of what a stupid idea this is.

John starts to cough despite the cleanness of the smoke.

You worry about that instead.

==>

“Man, I’m not high.”

He’s completely high.

“No, seriously, I don’t feel any different.”

You tell him to try standing up.

He teeters precariously as he does so.

“ _Oh._ ”

You laugh at him.

“Seriously, are we going to do anything or are you just going to sit here?”

Ugh.

He’s an active stoner.

Well, maybe he can find you some food, then.

He smacks you.

“Get your own food! Wait, is it too late to order pizza?”

It’s never too late to order pizza.

==>

He tells you that his voice sounds funny. You tell him that’s normal.

He tells you that the room is spinning. You tell him to drink some water, he’s dehydrated.

He tells you that this shitty Texan pizza is the most delicious thing he’s ever tasted.

You just agree.

He kisses you and it’s sloppy and greasy and you can’t even bring yourself to care because he’s warm and a bit soft and he likes you, though maybe not- _hopefully_ not- as much as you like him.

And then his kisses are wet, not just greasy, and you snap out of your drifting and look at him.

He doesn’t look too gone yet, but _he’s drooling_.

 _“Fuck!”_ and you grab him by the collar and he makes a confused, hurt noise as you drag him to the bathroom and you feel kind of bad for it but he starts to wretch right as you’re getting the toilet seat up.

You’re a lot less high than you were a second ago, and a hell of a lot less happy. You grab his glasses before they can fall in the toilet.

“Have you been drinking?” you ask him when it slows to just groans and hiccups and then “How much have you been drinking?” because he’s not greening out, you’ve seen greening out and this isn’t that, this is more like mixing.

His hair is plastered to his forehead and he’s leaning heavily against the toilet bowl and he doesn’t even answer your question, he just looks at you and asks you how _you knew???_ in that croaky post-vomit voice.

You tell him drooling is a pre-emetic response and he has no idea what that means and you ask him if he’s been drinking and he looks guilty.

You ask him if he was drinking _before_ he drove here and he looks guiltier.

If he wasn’t already in a shit poor state, you’d beat the shit out of him because _what the fuck made him think that was a good idea?_

He looks a little miserable.

“I missed you.”

You can tell he means it. You struggle with sudden dry mouth.

You’ve crossed a line. You can’t tell yourself that it doesn’t matter because he’s going to get bored with you and find someone else to screw around with, not anymore. You can’t say you haven’t mentioned it because it’s not permanent, that you haven't mentioned it because it doesn’t matter.

You’ve crossed the line and now you’re lying to your brother about something that matters, something that might continue to matter.

You’ve crossed the line into _in_ _too deep_.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the author is too busy rolling around screaming and sobbing grossly on a bed of emotions to write a chapter summary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys are actually-
> 
> I. I just.
> 
> No words. I don't have words.
> 
> You're just best. Ever. Of all of the fandoms I've written for, I have never had such highly perceptive and unapologetically sweet reviewers. Seriously. I know I'm doing something kind of unorthodox here so I greet every new comment with a little feeling of dread but it's always magnificent, you guys are just wonderful, if I don't stop talking now I'm just going to thesaurus synonyms for 'the best' at you. (Thesaurus is a verb, I will not be dissuaded.)
> 
> Oh, and for those of you who are interested, my tumblr is brodingershat.tumblr.com. I only have one post at the moment- the first half of a tutorial- but I'm pretty active on it and I've been considering using it for update notifications and whatnot. Um. Anyway. Go read this thing, you crazy kids.

You shift D# back into the closet- he generates a shitty graphic of a breaking heart and you don’t feel bad because you know for a fact that he’s fucking with you- and get John settled into the bed with a garbage can within arm’s reach and he tries to kiss you and you tell him _not unless you brush your damn teeth first_.

He sticks out his tongue at you lazily.

You just look at him.

You don’t know what to do. You don’t know if you should call him out on it- _not now, later, not now, no matter what D# says_ \- or if you should call Dave and just… tell him.

You wouldn’t even know how to.

There’s no casual way to say _yo, I’m boning your best friend, hope that’s cool_ and have him believe you’re not just fucking with him.

And you wouldn’t even know where to start having a serious conversation about this.

It seems simple, but the words are bound up in your throat by confusion and the dull ache of reluctance at the thought of losing him, of never seeing that goofy blank smile or that puppyish stare of adoration or that grin, that _wicked fucking shit-eating grin_ he only gets when he knows he’s got something on you, even that, because it’s all so absolutely _John_ and you’ve got it so bad for him.

Now it’s official.

You’ve done more than bomb down Weird Mountain.

You did a fucking swan dive off of the peak into Fucked Up Crevasse, a little south of Almost Illegal Hollow and east of Cradle Robber Gorge, and you’re stuck down here with nothing but a roll of duct tape and a vibrator and you can’t think of anything constructive to do with them.

John laughs at nothing and you lose your train of thought.

You’re kind of grateful.

He’s examining his fingers like they’re the most fascinating things he’s ever seen.

“Man, I could’ve used some of this on Jade’s ship.”

You look at him, confused, because _what ship?_ and he looks back at you with a little smile and draws his thumb and forefinger across his lips like he’s zippering them.

Even if you knew how to ask, you know just by looking at him that he’s not going to answer.

You’re both resentful and relieved.

You guess this means that you really only have one option, not two.

==>

You own a trunk.

An actual trunk.

Not just a duffel bag, a real luggage _trunk_.

You have no idea where it came from. You have no idea how long you’ve owned it. Its existence is a mystery to you.

You wonder if it belongs to Dave, if he forgot it when he moved.

You wonder if Dave stashed it in the back of the closet to fuck with you.

You wonder if _John_ stashed it in the back of the closet to fuck with you.

You decide you don’t care and take the duffel bag anyway.

==>

“Are you going somewhere?”

Ah.

John’s up.

When you close the medicine cabinet, you can see his reflection standing in the doorway.

You turn.

“Yeah.”

He wrinkles his nose because _you don’t go anywhere_ , _who are you kidding??_

“I’m visiting Dave.”

You’re not sure how to feel about his expression.

“But… you’ve never visited Dave.”

You snort a little breathlessly. You don’t know why you feel guilty. You shouldn’t. “I know. That’s why I’m going. Coming with me?”

He’s doing something with his mouth.

You think he might be chewing the side of his tongue or the inside of his cheek.

You’ve never seen him do that before.

“Not coming?” you press, and he crosses his arms over his chest.

“…I’m coming. Are we leaving right now? I haven’t showered yet.”

It’s noon. You’re already going to have to make a night stop.

The light display in your glasses obstructs your vision for a moment.

> He’s stalling.

You wish you didn’t believe that.

You tell him you’re leaving at one, with or without him, and he asks you _how you’re even getting there???_ and you get the distinct feeling that he’s weighing the chances of you relying on the use of his car as leverage in this… _whatever_ this is.

You hate that you’re fighting a battle without knowing the stakes or the rules or the _point_.

You tell him you have a car of your own.

He looks more troubled than surprised.

==>

When you get to the parking garage, he breaks the tension by laughing. You can’t really blame him.

“ _Is that a hatchback???”_

It’s a Honda. A Honda almost as old as he is.

“I was expecting, like… a truck! Or a van! That’s not even a van, it’s… _Bro, you drive a mom car!!!”_

You need some way to move large amounts of product from your home to the post office, and you’re sure as hell not going to risk storing thousands of dollars in the bed of a truck.

And you already look suspicious enough. A van would just make that worse.

He’s laughing so hard you’re a little concerned he’ll be sick again but you don’t think you can stop him because you wear shitty stupid anime glasses and carry a katana and _you have an old lady car!!!!!_

“It’s just so _ironi-_ ”

Suddenly he looks disgusted.

And then thoughtful.

And then dumbfounded.

“That’s it, right?”

You raise an eyebrow at you because honestly, you’re not even sure what he’s talking about anymore.

“The irony… thing.”

You’re still not sure what he means.

“So… it’s like… you’re… super sensible about really stupid stuff and really ridiculous about normal stuff but you’re kind of serious about all of it in a way that makes it seem like you’re not but also like you _are anyway while not being while being and not being, umm??_   _so it’s like even the irony thing is ironic, it’s like this endless, uh, thing- this thing, a thing with seriousness and not-seriousness in this weird irony vortex-”_

He’s doing something really weird with his hands.

“Don’t hurt yourself.”

You say that, but he still goes into ironophilosophical catatonia for the first few hours of the drive.

==>

You discover a significant issue with D#'s permanently impaired mental state.

He doesn’t seem to comprehend that obscuring your vision while you drive is a bit of an issue.  After the third time, you just give up and take off your shades. You wish it wasn’t necessary.

John keeps trying to interfere with your driving.

_He forgot his toothbrush._

He can buy another one. Hell, you’ll buy him another one.

_He needs to use the washroom._

If he’s not in pain, he’s not going to piss on your seat. He’ll survive.

  _He forgot his EpiPen._

You politely remind him that his allergy is severe enough that any sign of a reaction requires immediate medical attention.

You remember this because Dave is terrible at reading labels. It was an issue more than once.

He flounders out about six different excuses at you for that slip-up and you guess it’s because he somehow hasn’t figured out that you already know he’s lying to you.

You see a little pulse of orange in your peripheral vision. D# is still running a commentary, even with your glasses hooked into your collar. You wish you could check what he had to say about that, but you both agreed that John doesn’t need to know about your interest in robotics. Or artificial intelligence.

Or anything he doesn’t know already, really, until you find out what the fuck is going on with him.

You think John just asked you something. You don’t ask what it was.

The car lapses into uncomfortable silence.

It’s a bizarrely visceral thing. The air conditioning feels too sharp, almost overactive, where it hits your arms, but the air around your head is almost still.

A semi-circle of condensation is forming in the corner of your window. Shit.

You think it might be time to get this car checked out.

But not right now. Later.

==>

You finally give in to his pleas and pull into a rest stop around midnight. You even get a room in the hotel.

You were just going to sleep in your car. You’re not sure John would appreciate that. Or if he’d even let you sleep.

Your initial response is two rooms, but he vetoes that because it’s _stupid!!_ and then you ask for a room with two beds and he starts sulking and by the end of the whole ordeal you’re actually a little worried that the woman at the front desk is going to call the police on you because John almost _looks_ like a child when he acts like one, _especially_ when he’s standing next to you.

You always forget how much shorter than you he is. Maybe because he acts big, talks big, never seemed too afraid of you.

But he’s small. Not too small, about average, maybe a little short for his age, and he has a distinctive kind of build, the kind that usually stops growing around twenty-three or twenty-four and gets barrel-chested and heavy-cheeked around forty. He’s still a bit soft, but you’ve seen enough naked men to read the meaning in those densely corded shoulders and thighs. He won’t always be small, but he is now.

But you- well.

You’re not small.

You haven’t been small for a very, very long time.

Even when you were, you weren’t. You were thin when you were younger, but you were always a tall kid and now you’re a tall adult.

You just filled out, about half of it probably from genetics and the other half from a wild love of fighting anyone who would fight you, getting denser and broader until somebody finally commented that you didn’t look like a twink anymore and you realized they were right.

You never got soft or heavy, just a little sharper every year until the rest of you was almost as angular as your sunglasses.

Speaking of which.

> Bro. Wake up. John’s getting suspicious.

You blink and _oh_ , you guess that’s true, he’s already got shit strewn everywhere- is he unpacking? Christ, he’d better not use this as an excuse to delay you tomorrow- and he’s looking at you kind of strangely.

You do the sensible thing and just pull your damn toothbrush from its pocket and leave everything else where it belongs. You hope he’ll get the gist.

> That was a little pointed. I take it you think he’s pulling something?

You hum in quiet agreement and go into the bathroom.

> Oh, I had to override the restrictions on your phone, by the way. I can’t access your shades by magic.

You sense the accusation behind those words and snort. “You can take care of yourself just fine,” you mutter.

> That’s beside the point.

That is completely the point. He’s just lazy.

> You’re killing me here, Bro.

“Are you talking to yourself?”

The light display in your shades flicks off and you can see John, a vague blueness just at the edge of your vision.

You ignore his question in favour of laughing at his pajamas.

He is successfully distracted.

> Nice.

==>

The darkness makes your resolve weaker than you’d like to admit. It’s like a part of you thinks if you can’t see it, it didn’t happen.

D# told you to keep a respectable distance to keep your head clear and you know it’s good advice.

But here in the dark, lying on unfamiliar sheets, it seems a little less urgent, a little less serious, and you almost want to convince yourself that you’re overreacting, that you’ve invented the whole scenario out of paranoia.

In the dark, the comedy factor of pushing him off the bed doesn’t outweigh the weird titillation of him sneaking in beside you or the breathless noise he makes when he spoons up against you.

 Heady morality and self-righteousness are bright things and he’s a dark little thing with cold fingers and a warm mouth _and a boner against your ass_ , you guess that’s a fitting end to your poetic musings.

You consider pushing him off the bed like you originally intended, but then he starts palming you through your jeans and you groan and he asks you _why you’re wearing jeans to bed???_ and you can’t even laugh because this is why, _he_ is why, for all the good it did you.

He toys with the button experimentally and you don’t stop him because maybe you can convince him you’re sleeping or something but then he slips his hand down your pants and bites you on the nape of the neck and _fuck,_ why is it always so hard to say no to him, you need a rubber band to snap against your wrist or one of those spray bottles people use to deter their cats to use on him or _something,_ just something, _fuck._

He’s grinding against your ass and you hate yourself for not bringing any lube or condoms even though not doing this was kind of the whole damn point.

You’re pretty sure he’s going to be at this for a while, so you rationalize not losing half a night’s sleep over half-heartedly resisting his advances and just fucking roll over, _why the hell not._

Well, you know why not.

It doesn’t seem to mean much when he wiggles closer and slips that one arm nobody knows what to do with under your pillow like he’s never had that issue in his life and just _fits_ against you like he’s meant to be there, like you’d have to be stupid to think he didn’t, and kisses you, slow and lazy, tracing the fingers of his free hand down your side and across your stomach.

And you think, for the thousandth time, that this kid is going to be the death of you.

But somehow, it doesn’t mean the same thing it used to.

Now you think you might mean it.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's a bit short, sorry; I'm going to be working all weekend and have a shitload to do this coming week, so updates may slow for a little bit. I'll do my best! I love this story and I love you guys are we're just getting to the best part, _unnnngh!_ Seriously, I've wanted to write the coming chapters since I started my slippery slide down Plot Lane.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This part is reserved for incoherent screaming because I have just gained thirteen new tumblr followers in the last day, holy everloving shit.

He doesn’t wake up when you do.

You’re glad.

While in any other circumstances you’d consider it your duty to whip off the blankets and pelt him with little packages of hotel soap until he moved his ass to the shower or spontaneously manifested clothes through sheer force of will, you’re pretty sure getting ready while dealing with his bullshit would’ve been nigh impossible.

You should be anxious. You know that.

Yet the prospect of telling your kid brother that his best friend is emulating an infamous little girl in heart glasses in either the worst or best way- maybe both, who the fuck are you to know, you’re embroiled in this mess - is somehow less daunting than the prospect of putting up with John’s shit until you snap and start trying to find answers in an equally dishonest and unscrupulous way.

You don’t need experience to know that this is not a healthy scenario to apply to an already fucked-up relationship. Nobody wants Batman rifling through their dirty laundry.

Well.

You honestly don’t know what prompted that thought.

It’s too early. You need to stop thinking.

That’s simple enough, given that you’ve already crossed off the getting-your-shit-together box on your to-do list. You’re showered. You’re dressed. Your shit’s together and you’ve had your mandatory having a dick does not give you an excuse to be a fucking moron from D#. You’re just stalling.

You don’t think he’s going to be too happy when he wakes up and finds out that it’s eight in the morning and you’ve already taken the initiative to stuff everything but his toothbrush and a change of underwear back in his bag.

Sooner or later, he’s going to have to come to terms with the fact that when you say you’re going to do something, you’ll really fucking do it.

And now you have to wake him up.

You can’t do it by throwing shit at him, though, that’s only if you just got up, too.

This requires some delicacy.

==>

You’re almost finished building a pyramid from complimentary goods- the woman at the front desk almost caught you the second time you stole a box of extra soap, so you’ve moved on to improvising with carefully folded facecloths and a can of breath mints you swiped in return for her sass this morning, and the going has been slow- when John wakes up and knocks the whole thing down by sitting up.

You try very hard to convey your disappointment with him through telepathy.

He’s visibly baffled by the pile of soap and mints and facecloths. “Wha- Ugh. It’s too early for this, Bro.”

It’s never too early for breath mints.

Does he want a breath mint?

He looks at you like you’re a complete lunatic, but he does, in fact, take a breath mint.

And then he notices.

“Did… you… _did you pack for me???_ ”

You look at him.

“You’re slow.”

And he gives you this look like he wants to say something like _well yeah, duh_ but he doesn’t for reasons that seem obvious to you.

He just looks at his luggage and sighs before shuffling out of bed and into the bathroom.

You feel a bit guilty.

Then you remember that he’s been pulling this pushy shit on you since he showed up in your apartment.

You _still_ don’t know where he got a fucking key.

==>

The rest of the drive entails you giving him a roadmap to amuse himself with and ignoring all of his directions because really, you’re not that stupid.

The closer you get to New York, the antsier he seems to be- and the more your car seems to act up.

It’s like the universe is resisting you.

The thought only spurs you on. _Fuck_ the universe, you owe it nothing.

==>

Once you get into the state itself, you realize something.

You have no idea where the Lalondes live.

You’ve written the address on parcels before, sure- no way were you going to let your little bro move in with his girlfriend without sending him a sexual care package, no fucking way- but finding the place is different.

When you make your first wrong term, you rediscover your love of irony.

John has been leaning with his cheek against the window for the last two hours, finally resigned to his fate.

John apparently doesn’t realize that you don’t know where you’re going.

John _corrects_ you.

==>

God _damn_ , that is certainly a house.

It’s as if someone took a bunch of perfectly square rooms and fitted all of them with long rectangular windows and stacked them around a silo- except you’re pretty sure that’s an observatory and there are fucking pillars, this house has pillars built into its architecture in a way that’s not exclusively aesthetic, _holy shit,_ these people are loaded.

Well.

 _You’re_ loaded. You just don’t act like it.

And you doubt an artsy work of civil engineering like this one was funded by plush rumps and vibrators.

You close your car door with a firm, frame-rattling slam- not like it'll close any other way, this car's a fucking beater, you finally accepted that after you spent the last hour or so squinting against the intensity of the wheezing air conditioning- and John shushes you furiously because _you’ll wake someone!!!_

As far as you can see, someone’s already awake.

And strangely enough, it looks like she was expecting you.

She’s a pretty little thing, blonde in soft ways with sharp looks, and she’s watching you from the doorway, for all the world as though she’d invited you here.

John’s been whispering at you. You haven’t been listening. You know when he finally turns to look where you’re looking because he gasps _“Rose!”_ in a weird, strangled voice that isn’t really surprise.

It’s more like… reproach.

He sounds like he’s scolding her.

“What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be _in London!”_ he hisses at her, and you raise an eyebrow at him because _woah, that’s certainly a way to greet someone._

She smiles in a tiny, sidelong way and it’s bizarrely endearing and you’re having the weirdest fucking moment right now, you don’t even know this girl.

“John,” she starts softly and you’re fascinated because her voice carries musically, she could be standing right fucking next to you, “I would never miss this.”

Well, that’s-

You’re not really sure what you’ve gotten yourself into.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should be doing a project right now.
> 
> Welp.

As expected, John’s exactly the sort of rude little asshole who brings friends to a party and then neglects to introduce them to anyone, leaving them to hover awkwardly by the cooler until someone pities them enough to take up his mantle- if they’re lucky. If they’re not, they’ll be chilling in the corner until the party ends.

You’re those friends. Both of them. They’re the you that’s standing in the foyer and the you that vacations in your glasses and you’re both just sort of looking at this girl and thinking this is so fucking weird but John’s too busy making faces at her to save you from the social pariahgatory that is being you with new people whose opinion of you might actually _matter_.

Fortunately, his friend has better manners.

She introduces herself as _Miss Rose Lalonde_ , _it’s a pleasure, Mister Strider_ , and furnishes her delicate handshake with a beautifully crafted little barb about John’s childlike inability to adhere to social protocols, _his artlessness is so endearing, isn’t it?_

And it’s just _so endearing, isn’t it?_ and she’s just _music_ , pitch-perfect wryness given shape, shape that’s all careful dark nails on slim fingers and flawless black lipstick on an impish little smile and coyly narrowed eyes under pointedly raised eyebrows and _you don’t even know how to cope with what you’re feeling, it’s completely terrifying._

You kind of feel like beating the shit out of the boyfriend she must have lurking around here _somewhere_ and you don’t even know why except that you _do_ know why, you know exactly why-

You fucking love this girl. You have known her for less than a minute and she’s already the coolest person you’ve met in the last fifteen years. You don’t need to know who this hypothetical other half is to know that the chances of him being as cool as she is are dangerously low.

She chuckles a little- it’s quiet and it comes out from behind closed lips and a knowing look- and you realize you’ve just been holding her hand like a huge fucking weirdo.

So you let go and pretend that didn’t just happen and she pretends that didn’t just happen and you can feel John staring holes into the side of your head and you do not give a single _fuck_ , you should’ve come here years ago.

==>

Lalonde- _Rose is fine. May I call you Bro?_ \- doesn’t get any less cool over the next ten minutes or so.

She _does_ get a little more unnerving.

She takes you to a guestroom on the main floor of the house because _everyone else is sleeping, of course. But you’ve had a long drive, haven’t you, Bro?_ and John forgets the fundamental weirdness of assuming that he’s bunking with you and Rose’s eyebrows climb to new heights of pointed suspicion and, for some reason, you feel like that has more to do with the slip itself than any implications therein.

It doesn’t make sense.

You still get that impression.

After she leads John away- he shoots you a little unhappy look over his shoulder, like _this is all your fault_ and you guess it kind of is- you mention it to D# and he tells you that you’re paranoid.

> You didn’t tell her. I didn’t tell her. Unless John told her, she doesn’t know.

You still feel like she knows.

> You know what I don’t miss? Precognitive organs. You know something terrible is going to happen, but you never know if it’s happening to your life or your toilet bowl.

Ha- _fucking_ -ha.

> Anyway, that feeling in your gut probably has more to do with exhaustion than intuition, Bro.

> Go the fuck to sleep.

You take your own advice.

==>

It turns out to be damn good advice, too.

When you wake up, the improbable aggregation of cubes and pillars that is the Lalonde household is even more of an incomprehensible shitstorm than it was the night before.

The giant wizard statue and little wizard statues and grand bookcases full of wizardly literature were bad enough without factoring in the gentle hum of the custom-plated-but-still-fully-functional vacuum on a pedestal, but right now you can’t even hear the vacuum over the bullshit that’s going on down outside your door and you doubt it’s because someone had the presence of mind to turn it off.

This just doesn’t seem like that kind of house.

 You open your door to the sound of John yelling and _oh, that must be Harley._

She’s a whirling mass of exactly the kind of vibrant energy that makes you feel tired by extension, a grabby kiddish thing in a t-shirt and jeans and a slouchy knitted hat, and between the droopy hat and the long hair and the huge-ass coke bottle glasses, the visible part of her face is essentially just buckteeth.

And she’s jumping on John, so your morning is marked by buckteeth-on-buckteeth action and you have _no idea_ where that thought came from, you need some fucking coffee before you even try to deal with this.

But it seems you’re shit out of luck, son, because _this_ , buckteeth and all, has noticed you.

She _throws_ herself at you and you brace for impact.

You fail to brace for impact. She’s heavier than you expected.

You smash your elbow on the doorknob on the way down and _oh shit,_ your fingers are numb, this is the worst feeling ever.

Harley is either oblivious to your pain or just doesn’t care, because she sits up on your chest and howls your last name in your face like she just engaged an old foe in battle and you laugh because _okay, that’s a pretty badass self-introduction,_ you can respect that.

==>

Dave tries to act cool when he sees you, which is pretty much what you expected.

He does a pretty good job of it, too, only shaking a little bit when he fist-bumps you, passing off an elbow to the gut like he didn’t just do it because he missed you and he’s pissed you didn’t tell him you were coming- all in all, he keeps it pretty motherfucking cool.

Then Harley happens, and _happening_ , as you’ve learned, is a physical experience when this girl is involved.

He’s less cool when she hip-checks him into you and crushes herself into his back and does her absolute damnedest to _be_ the group hug despite the fact that she can’t actually reach all the way around both of you at once.

Dave grunts uncomfortably against your chest and you just sort of raise your hands defensively and hope she’ll stop.

She doesn’t stop. Nobody ever stops because you might want them to.

“Dave,” she hisses, faced pressed close against his ear like there’s a point to whispering when you’re all mashed together like this, “this is no time to be mister cool guy!”

Dave grunts. You grunt in agreement. She must not approve because _not all of us have people to hug, you know!!!_ and oh damn, you thought Dave was joking about that.

And Dave says, “Harley, don’t pull this lonely-girl-raised-by-wolves shit on me, you’ve hugged everyone in this house so many times you’ve got mvp status at the hug championships, you’re the hug master, the monastic hugging sensei from deathmurder island, it’s you-” and then she lets go of you to jab him in the sides and he tries to grab her wrists and they dissolve into the kind of grappling routine you suspect comes from him being unwilling to risk hurting her and her taking advantage of that by tickling him.

It’s a weird parallel to your own situation- a lot sweeter, a hell of a lot healthier- and you’re all too aware of that.

At least, you would be, but then she yells that she _was raised by a dog, not wolves!!! One dog!! You know that, Dave!!!_ in the middle of a bunch of other stuff and _wait, no, what,_ you thought Dave was fucking with you about that, too.

“You were raised by a dog?”

Dave looks impatiently at you from the floor, but his _I already told you that, bro, try listening sometime_ is no match for her overabundance of enthusiasm and she tells you _yes!!!!! but only after grandpa died!!_ because she’s not Tarzan, you know, _no matter what Dave says!!!_

You want to tell her _shitty buzz, man_ but you’re preoccupied by how completely she seems to lack a concept of personal space.

You think that if John Egbert was a girl and somebody had his _relentlessly touchy-feely_ and _pointlessly enthusiastic_ stats dialed up to eleven and his _entitled little shithead_ stat dialed down from _no means yes_ to _well-meaning_ , the result would be this girl. They even look alike.

A _lot_ alike, actually.

It’s not even just the teeth.

They both talk with their hands, gesturing restlessly like they think they can summon images from the air, like they can _make_ you understand what their words can’t by backhanding things off of tables in fits of excitement or elbowing Dave in the nose, _shit, that looked like it hurt._

She reacts exactly how you expect her to, which is immediate guilt and _oh my god, Dave, I’m so sorry!!!!!! are you okay??_ and Dave just sort of shrugs and holds his nose.

“This is my fault, I should expect this by now,” and then he asks her if his glasses are damaged and she rolls her eyes because _your silly glasses aren’t as important as your face!!!_ and he makes a crack about her only being with him for his _fine-ass Strider swag_ and she tells him that him that his _Strider swag is just being a huge butthead!!!!_ and then she gets awkward and shy and apologizes because she thinks she offended you or something, you guess.

You’re not offended.

You’re too busy trying to deal with the fact that your little brother is apparently as huge a fucking sucker for pushy, excitable idiots as you are.

You’re trying to tell yourself that isn’t a validation of your suspicions, _he really does seem to like this chick, it might not be like that._

You’re trying to tell yourself that this won’t ruin your relationship with him, that this doesn’t have to be a huge fucking deal.

You’re trying to tell yourself that there’s going to _be_ an opportune moment to bring this up, even if it’s not now.

Because you’re not going home without doing what you came here to do.

You really hope that doesn’t end up meaning you’re stuck here, stuck loitering weirdly in this weird fucking house for the rest of your life, because _fuck, this is going to be way harder than you expected._


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which everything you know is wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally up! And finally, the plot is knocking.

The titular ‘Mom’ Lalonde you keep hearing mentioned turns out to be a very well-dressed woman with terrible taste in décor and excellent taste in gin.

She also turns out to be in a relationship with John’s father.

Who, as far as you can tell, may not actually have a name. While Dave slipped up and called Mom Lalonde _Roxy_ , nobody’s called ‘Dad’ Egbert anything but _Dad_.

Even Mom calls him Dad. You don’t even want to get into the implications of that.

Not that you’re in a position to judge. At least they’re in the same age group.

And hold respectable jobs.

And they both raised pretty damn fine children, let’s be fair.

You’re sleeping with John. You can’t really say Dad did a poor job raising him, because honestly, you’re probably his worst decision.

Rose is… you don’t even know how to express how you feel about Rose. The two of you had an extensive conversation about tentacles this morning and you didn’t even realize how weird that should’ve been until you noticed that you’d cleared the room of other occupants. You decided you didn’t care, anyway, because she just looked so goddamn pleased to have a semi-serious conversation about it.

Then she started making deadpan little jokes at you and you returned them in kind and _god, if her mom wasn’t already loaded you’d buy her a fucking pony, one with a heart tattooed on its ass or something_ and it’d honestly be more sincere than ironic and now you’re just sort of together most of the time and John _hates_ it.

And you mean that.

He _hates_ it.

You’re not sure if it’s because he’s afraid you’ll say something or if he’s got a thing with Rose- but she doesn’t _take an interest in the masculine gender- at least not in **that** way_ , so you guess not- and then you wonder if he thinks she’s going to say something to _you_ and that feeling’s back, your guts are going prophetic on you again.

John lurks around the edges of the room and never tries to interrupt, but you don’t think it has much to do with the tentacle thing.

And then it occurs to you to wonder what he’s afraid she’s going to say to _him_ so you ask and she just smiles her little smile and you think you’ve hit another dead end, _these kids are impossible_.

But when you go to crash out for the night- not because you’re tired, because there’s something fundamentally awkward about being the only person awake in a stranger’s house- you sit on something hard.

It seems that someone left a sketchbook in your bed.

==>

You’re browsing carefully through dubiously accurate zoological drawings and naggingly familiar pictography- a _green_ _house, five parts and a roof, where have you seen this before?_ \- when you hear furtive shuffling outside your door.

You slide the sketchbook under the bed.

Somehow, you don’t think Rose left it in here with John in mind.

And it _is_ John. Who else would sneak into your room at night?

No one, apparently, because you were correct.

You pretend to be asleep and watch him from under your eyelashes as he pulls the door closed and then slowly turns the doorknob back to its original position. You can barely hear the tongue of the latch slide into place. He’s pretty good at this.

And _damn_ , you did miss that ass. You abstained by coming here, but the irony of the situation is, of course, that the inaccessible is always more enticing.

Judging by the way he’s eying you- and the fact that he just snuck through three floors of ceramic clutter to jump you- you’re not the only thrill-seeker here.

You can’t help your little grin when you feel the bed dip with his weight.

He huffs and whispers “I knew you were awake, you dick,” and you snicker.

Despite everything, the feel of his mouth on yours- sharp with toothpaste and sloppy with fatigue- is welcome.

You hate him sometimes, but you never hate him more than you-

Well.

More than you don’t.

So you just kiss him back, slipping off your gloves and running a hand through his smooth, wiry hair and he presses himself flush to you and it feels so _right_ , so completely _natural_ , and in moments like this you could almost believe the two of you weren’t here on some sort of bizarre mission of mysterious one-upmanship.

Moments like this worry you, because in them, your line of acceptable sacrifices starts to blur, and the other side of that line is only supposed to include Dave.

Logically, you understand that Dave’s not a child anymore, but you feel like your priorities are starting to change and that terrifies you and they’re changing for someone whose motives you don’t understand and that terrifies you, too, because yours were always out there for those who were looking.

But when John leans his forehead into yours and just looks at you like there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with any of this, he cuts himself a little deeper into you, and you’re honestly scared of how deep that mark can go because you’ve done a lot of things but you’ve never done this, never this, not _this_.

John’s icy fingers linger along your beltline and you snap back to reality.

“Shouldn’t,” you murmur and he bites his lip because _yeah,_ _he knows_ , but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to and it doesn’t mean you don’t want to.

And he fumbles with your belt in the dark and it sounds _so loud, holy shit_ and he giggles breathlessly into your mouth as you grab him through his shorts and _god, you feel like a teenager, what the fuck_ and he snorts at that and he’s _way too loud, holy shit, shut up!_ And you feel even _more_ like a kid now and you’re both kind of laughing at each other because you’re a couple of idiots with their hands down each other’s pants trying not to get caught by somebody’s mom, this is ridiculous.

It’s less ridiculous when he buries his face in your chest with a groan, and it actually starts feeling kind of hot when he admits that he really wants to fuck you, though there’s _no way that’s going to happen right now, you have shitty fucking timing, John_.

But he ends up rolling on top of you and lazily grinding against you while you palm his ass and it’s fine, this is fine, everything’s fine, you’re probably not going to sleep tonight and he’s going to tiptoe upstairs at five in the morning and the two of you are going to act like a pair of jumpy asshole teenagers tomorrow because you’re fooling around in a house full of people, but right now, the world is so still and silent aside from his little noises that it may as well not exist.

==>

You’re right. You’re pretty good at not acting like a guilty teenager- a lifetime of experience will do that for you- but John is jittery and flushed all throughout breakfast, and you’re both exhausted.

Rose keeps treating you to a look that’s the closest expressive equivalent to a long-suffering _Really?_ that you’ve ever seen and you don’t _care_ what D# says, she knows something.

You guess the sketchbook was a clue. Unfortunately, you haven’t had another chance to look at it.

Or the presence of mind to try.

==>

Sometimes you think John should have come with a warning attached- some little tag sewn in that you only find after the first rinse cycle when it’s already turned to mush, _whatever the fuck that means,_ you don’t know, you didn’t sleep last night _._

But he definitely merits danger symbols. Probably not the classic ones- he’s not exactly corrosive, however clever he might think his jabs are- just something big and visible to let you know what the fuck you’re getting into before you get into it.

 A big blue _potential exhibitionist_ would probably do well enough, because honestly, you probably wouldn’t have heeded a warning anyway- but at least you’d have already known.

Combine that with his inexplicable need to escalate things and _damn_ , you’re probably going to caught, it’s probably going to happen, and that’s really not how you want that conversation to start.

Unfortunately, when he catches you in the observatory- because _yeah_ , that was what that silo was, no way in hell you weren’t going to scope it out- in the middle of the afternoon, you both know everyone else is downstairs or outside and it’s just _too damn tempting_ because you’re not exactly a paradigm of caution, either.

You’d forgotten what it felt like to sneak around like this- for as long as Dave’s been around, you haven’t brought anyone over, and what trysts you have had usually end in you slipping out the window like an asshole.  

And by usually you mean consistently.

Because fuck no, you’re not sticking around to have breakfast with some guy you met in the lotions aisle of a pharmacy.

Hilariously, you apparently _will_ stick around for a kid who breaks all of your shit and disrespects your personal space and lies to you, and you suddenly feel a lot more sympathetic towards girls with douchebag boyfriends than you did ten seconds ago.

When you were thinking about fooling around with said douchebag.

He's starting to look a little impatient.

He pulls at you and you tell him to cool his fucking jets, you _haven’t had any sleep_ and he just rolls his eyes like that’s not his fault. For a second you consider just saying _fuck it, fuck you_ and leaving him to his own sexually frustrated devices, but then somebody slams a door downstairs and he gets that weird look of nervous excitement again and it’s kind of infectious and _this is such a bad idea holy shit_ , but that’s pretty much why it’s exciting.

It’s a bizarrely exhilarating thing- the two of you are being so furtive about this that it takes about a minute of flirty elbowing and muffled snickers before you end up making out behind the telescope.

And you’re both fully clothed and you don’t dare take anything off just in case someone comes in so you’re just touching each other through your clothes and it’s _such a tease_ , _fuck, you just want to rail him against that fucking window_ , and oh, yeah, you guess John’s more than a potential exhibitionist because it’s at that point that he starts pulling your shirt out of your jeans and making his way downwards.

Oh god, this is such a bad idea.

_You love it._

He’s still fumbling with your belt when you hear it. You grab him, listening.

And sure enough, you know that sound. You’ve been hearing that for years. That’s the sound of a kid who never learned to lift his feet properly when he walked, a kid whose sneaking always suffered for it because he could never quite manage a clean lift and drop of his shoes.

With your back to the telescope, you can’t see him, but judging by John’s expression, he can.

And Dave can see you.

Either you’ve successfully made yourself cease to exist or the air has suddenly become as thick as flesh, because the room is too still and heavy to breathe in. You can feel your pulse rising. You haven’t moved.

Dave hasn’t said anything.

You hate this. You hate not knowing what’s going to happen next. You hate waiting.

You’re not a kid in the principal’s office, you’re an incredibly fucking stupid grown-ass man, and you’re not going to play this game.

So you close your eyes, calm your fucking tits, shove the stupid asshole who got you into this mess off of your lap, and stand up.

Dave has his sword out. The broken one. You haven’t seen that in a while.

 _Fuck_.

Well, you’ll deal with this the Strider way, then. You think you might have liked it better if he was just yelling at you or something, though, because you’re not sure how beating the shit out of each other is going to solve this.

You retrieve your katana from your strife specibus and step forward and _wait,_ Dave’s not looking at you.

John’s holding his hammer.

 _Neither_ of them are looking you.

They’re just sort of eying each other. Silently. Two of the noisiest assholes you know.

> I don’t think you’re part of this fight.

That doesn’t make any sense.

> Dude.

John makes a little motion you don’t quite catch and Dave’s mouth tightens and John sighs through his nose and _what the fuck is going on_ , you suddenly don’t understand anything.

> Dude.

You spot Rose in the doorway. She smiles sympathetically and you will her to fill you in on the whatever the fuck you’re missing, because you have no idea what you’re supposed to be doing right now.

> Dude, I think you’re the chick here.

What?

> I think this might be a fight for your honour or something.

Wait.

_What?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Try as I might, I can't read the end of this chapter without hearing a record scratch noise.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A single-scene chapter, so a little short, but this one really needed to stand alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've wanted to write this scene since I started this piece. No lies.

_This is stupid._

Dave feints towards John and pulls back at the last minute when John doesn’t bite.

You just stand and stare at them numbly like a useless asshole.

_This is really fucking stupid._

> Oh my god, this is fucking hilarious.

This is _not_ hilarious.

This is just fucking stupid.

Now that you’ve stopped moving for long enough to start looking, it’s painfully obvious that there’s something going on here that’s been going on for a while.

Their movements are holding a conversation, and it’s clear it’s a conversation they’ve had before.

You’re not in on it.

You’re not fucking in on it.

It involves you, and you’re not fucking involved with it.

John moves in with a low swing and Dave goes to block and _no, you have had e-fucking-nough of this bullshit, fucking **no**_  and they both make awful sounds when you smash their heads together and John’s hammer clips your calf and you don’t care, you couldn’t fucking care less, you are absolutely finished with this preposterous mysteriodramatic horseshit, _fuck no._

John whines and his hammer is gone, back into his strife specibus, and he’s holding his head and Dave’s put his sword away too but he still looks fucking pissed and he still takes a swing at John’s stomach so you tuck his head under your arm because he needs to _calm his fucking tits_ and John’s trying to sneak off and _no, fuck no, get back here_ and you grab him by the back of his shirt and haul his ass back in.

It’s time to have a _heart to fucking heart_ and by heart to heart you mean somebody had better start fucking talking or you will start breaking shit.

John squirms in your grab and you hear Rose laugh softly and you can almost feel the glare he sends her because _this is all her fault!!!_

She quirks an eyebrow at him.  “I did attempt to approach this situation with some delicacy,” and she’s music again, you’re pretty sure the musicality of her voice is directly proportionate to how malicious she’s being- “Unfortunately, you made that impossible. I’m afraid you’ve forced my hand, John.”

She spreads her hands with a saintly expression of awful glee and she’s _perfect_ , she’s terrible and perfect and you’re almost not horribly fucking pissed off with everyone in this house.

Dave knows better than to squirm. He’s just standing there with his head in your armpit like he’s waiting for the noose to tighten.

John is still trying to squirm out of your hold, though, and you’re pretty sure this is going to end with him running around without a shirt on, so you tuck him under your other arm and hold the two of them like you’re shopping for fucking watermelons.

“I didn’t force _anything,_ ” John spits and then he looks nervous and you stare down at him and he’s using the position as an excuse to avoid looking up at you and you _know it_.

Rose looks like she’d like to say something, and judging by John’s expression, he knows what it is and he doesn’t like it.

So you haul the two idiots up by the backs of their necks and Dave just sort of bats at your hand experimentally- _letting go? no okay i didn’t think so-_ and John elbows you so you squeeze and he yowls and Dave snickers and John tries to kick him around you and you’re _this fucking close_ and a glass breaks and you look up.

Mom is standing- _well, swaying-_ in the doorway beside Rose. Rose has the heel of her palm pressed to her forehead.

Dave mutters something low and accusatory beside you and Rose winces and snaps at him. “I _can’t_ see her coming, Dave, that’s the problem.”

You have no idea what’s going on. This shit has been dragging on for minutes and you still don’t know anything you didn’t know before, which is essentially that John’s an asshole, Dave knows you too well, Rose is spectacular in the most infuriating way possible and her mother is a raging alcoholic.

You look back at the raging alcoholic.

There’s a broken martini glass halfway across the floor.

You think she might’ve thrown it on purpose.

She points at the three of you.

“I will have” it sounds like _haff_ , how drunk can she possibly be, it’s still the early afternoon- “none of this _ss_ ” and she pauses and you think it’s supposed to be a dramatic pause, oh jesus _christ_ , “in my huss. Herse. House.”

She looks so absurdly proud of herself for getting that word right that you’re almost proud too and so is D# because motherfucking baby steps, adorable.

Rose tries to interrupt her and is met with a hissing reply that was either beyond your powers of understanding or just a literal hiss.

“ _Now,_ ” the elder Lalonde starts again, “less talk ‘bout this, kay?” and then _let. let’sss. moore, not less._

This is so surreal.

You have no idea what’s happening.

She squints at you. You raise an eyebrow. She says something and you can’t even fucking help it, D# just transcribes it as  hay ur p. hot like woah not gon lie and now you can’t hear it as anything else and Rose looks like she’s going to hit her and you’re just baffled because you’ve been in this house for almost two days and she’s apparently just noticing this now.

And then she says  coulda had a worst- warse- worse (omg w/e) bby daddy amirite rosie, s’all good and Rose’s other hand flies to her face and Dave groans and you barely notice because your brain just fucking _stopped._

“What?”

Mom- _oh jesus christ that moniker is suddenly terrifying in ways you never considered-_ goes to say something and Rose lunges at her and shoves her hands over her mouth and that’s fine, it’s all fine, this room must be made of helium and lightning because you’re somewhere in the vicinity of Jupiter with a headache the size of the sun _maybe it is the sun holy shit_ and “I don’t _remember_ sleeping with you” _but that doesn’t really mean a hell of a lot_ and now that you’re looking you can see it, oh christ,  oh jesus fucking christ, she looks like you _, Rose really fucking looks like you._

You don’t have to ask her if it’s true.

Her expression is somewhere between an apology and intense exasperation and John says _It’s weird ‘cause he thought you just liked dudes_ and you kind of laugh distantly because _experimental stages are a still a thing and you had one fucking hell of an experimental stage_ and Dave kind of looks like he’s going to vomit if you say another word so you don’t, you just let both of them go because _what just happened to your life, what just happened,_ what the fuck, _oh fuck._

You look at Rose and wish you didn’t because suddenly all you can see is yourself mirrored in the way her eyebrows arch above her eyes and in her strong little pointed chin and _especially_ in her expressions and you don’t know what to say so you just say the stupidest thing possible.

“So… do I owe you… like, twenty years of child support or something?” and _jesus christ you’re an asshole_ but she giggles and waves it off and Mom- _oh god_ \- laughs too loudly and says something that might have been another mercifully incomprehensible come-on and you just try to restore brain function and John is sneaking away again and-

_Wait._

You look at him because _how long has he known about this?_

He fidgets nervously and _like seven years, I guess???_

Dave takes one look at you and fucking books it out of the room like the smart kid you always knew he had the potential to be.

John is not so apt.

You don’t hit him. You’re too busy trying to stop your face from doing terrible things because your ability to make logical deductions kicked back in at precisely the wrong fucking moment and he _knowingly slept with his best friend’s father._

“Dude, _what the fuck.”_

Rose tries to say something and he interrupts her because _you’re making it sound worse than it is!!!_ and you just laugh.

“John, that’s fucked up no matter _how_ you look at it.”

It’s _really not that bad, you’re overreacting!!!_ and Rose shares an almost telepathic look of _I know, right?_ with you and tries to say something again and _don’t you dare fucking say it, Rose!!!_ and nope, this is fucked up, this is-

“John… that’s kind of… Freudian, bro.”

And John’s expression of absolute horror almost explains Rose’s inscrutable look and she just comes over and wraps her arms around your waist and leans into you and looks straight at her mother and says _I’m going home with Daddy_ and the room descends into the most surreal fucking chaos you have ever had the misfortune of being involved in.

 


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shit goin' down in the Lalonde household. More kids. More Mom. Dad'll probably creep in eventually and then I'm going to have way too many characters to keep tabs on, oh god.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My formatting ambitions are hampered only by my frustration with span tags. So many span tags. How do people even _do_ pesterlog fics? Mad respect.
> 
> Also: _holy hell_ , readership, _**holy fucking hell**_. I love you. You're amazing. This story has over a hundred comments, is rapidly nearing three hundred kudos, and has _seven thousand hits_. (Oh my god.)

The time you spend with Rose is suddenly a different beast altogether.

You’re still _you_ , playfully kneecapping her arguments whenever she makes a minor mistake, and she’s still _her_ , doing her damnedest to wade through the morass of your psyche with the diagnostic set from her high school psychology textbook. You still drop pointed questions on her at inopportune moments. She still answers them with cryptic closed-lip smiles laced with a poisonous undercurrent of sympathy.

That much hasn’t changed.

But it’s _different_.

Suddenly, she’s not just John’s much brighter little friend. She’s not Jade’s partner-in-crime in conspiring against the boys and she’s not Dave’s ‘prime platonic ho’.

She’s not even just _Rose_ , not anymore.

She’s _your_ Rose.

She’s _your_ daughter.

And that scares the shit out of you because it _doesn’t_ and it _should_.

It’s not the fact that she’s yours. It’s not the fact that you somehow _know_ that to be true without question, and it’s not the fact that despite knowing that, you honestly feel like you’ve never met her mother before- there’s not  so much as an itch of recognition. Her mother’s a stranger, but Rose is still yours and that’s _fact_ for reasons you can’t explain, the same way you knew Dave was yours, _your_ little dude come riding down from exactly fucking nowhere, just like you.

When you picked Dave up from that crater, pieces of the world slid into place in a way you could never have anticipated and you were suddenly a part of it in a way you’d never been. You cut your way through bureaucratic hell to be sure you were registered as his legal guardian. You bulldozed institutions to be sure he was never taken away from you. You learned things about raising a child that you’d never expected or intended to know. But you were brothers in circumstance, two scrappy blond accidents in an irresponsible world, and the need to be sure he did better than you seemed to explain everything.

You don’t have that with Rose.

Rose doesn’t _need_ you. She’s not a baby. She’s not even a child, and you’re long passed that threshold- the disaster you spent so long preparing Dave for never came.

She’s a grown woman and life goes on but you still feel just like you did when you looked down into the ruined foundation of your record store.

You know, logically, that you should feel numb. You should be in denial. You should be upset, maybe, or angry that this girl thinks she can just _claim_ you when she barely even knows you.

You aren’t. You don’t.

Meeting Rose mended some broken little valve in your brain and somehow, everything’s a little bit _more_ right than it was and it _shouldn’t_ be.

You don’t understand why and D# either doesn’t know or is too perma-blazed to remember.

Every little piece of you is ignorant.

 _That_ terrifies you.

==>

John’s avoiding you.

You don’t blame him.

Dave isn’t, but you’re pretty sure he’s going out of his way to avoid being alone with you.

He reappeared during the inevitable bby mom n pops talk and just lingered while you and Mom- _Roxy_ , you guess you’re going to have to call her Roxy now, shit’s mad fucking rude and even you know that- hashed it out.

And by hashed it out you mean-

You’re not even sure what you mean.

That conversation essentially culminated in Rose sassing her mother and Roxy taking her _way_ too literally, to the point of offering you a permanent room in her home- _no thanks_ \- proposing to set you up nearby- _no_ \- moving the whole shebang to Texas- _don’t do that, please fucking don’t_ \- and offering _you_ money for living expenses, which was probably the weirdest of all, since she apparently already knows that you make a fuckload of it.

Her logic was, courtesy of D#, cant hav u goin nowere- noware- lol and in that moment, both of you came to a realization.

> This woman is dangerous, Bro.

_Yeah._

You’d thought most of Rose’s personality came from you, but there’s a well-hid sliver of sneakiness in her mother that you’ve seen surface in those riddling smiles.

Ordinarily, she’d be your first choice in the roster of people to ask what the fuck is going on here- she obviously knows something and liquor does not typically enhance secret-keeping qualities- but between that and her inexhaustible supply of flirtatiousness, you changed your mind.

Dave can be a reticent little shithead, but he’s _Dave._ You thought there might’ve been a chance he’d tell you now, even if he held out on you earlier.

You thought wrong.

Dave stuck to Roxy and Rose well into the evening, and then disappeared. Later, you caught him in kitchen and he disappeared again, turning corners and vanishing in a way that would make you proud if he wasn’t using it against you.

You think Dave knows you’re casting around. You don’t think he knows about the sketchbook- which you _still_ need to take another look at, but it’s a _sketchbook_ and you have no idea what you’re looking for- but you’re pretty sure he knows you’re fishing for a lead here and he’s determined not to be caught with the bait.

It’s almost dark by the time you catch him sitting on the floor in some sort of humid hell of a greenhouse with Harley and there’s only one door to this room, _fucking try it, bro, try and go through me if you think you can_.

He doesn’t try it.

Your threatening posture feels kind of goofy because he seems less concerned with getting past you and more concerned with handling Harley because her immediate reaction to your presence is to perk up like an excitable terrier- seriously, you could almost swear her hat twitched, your brain has branded her _the dog girl_ forever and now it’s creatively editing your optical feedback, just great- and that’s apparently _not okay_.

“So you know?!” she bursts out and you see an opportunity but so does Dave, evidently, because he grabs her and starts mumbling into her ear and you take the liberty of abandoning your post and squatting close beside them because you’re _pretty sure this concerns you, way to be fucking rude, Dave_.

Harley- _my name is Jade!!!!_ and you should’ve expected that, this seems to be a first-name basis mash of people- looks kind of upset and tries to say something and Dave hushes her and _he should know, Dave, this is so wrong!!!!_ and you certainly agree but Dave doesn’t and his nervous tangent involves a lot of misused metaphors and Harley- _Jade!!!!_ \- keeps interrupting him and if he slipped up, you missed it, it was buried too deeply in _you don’t  have to make the pitch just because you can_ and mentions of cricket sticks- _bats, Dave!!!_ \- and homeruns- _I think you’re thinking of baseball!!!_ \- and it passed you by.

Har- _Jade, sorry_ , there’s just something so familiar about her last name, you keep using it without thinking- invites you to help them- _she means help her ive got nothing to do with this im just her prisoner_ \- repot some herbs- _i wish i could say prisoner of love but its more like prisoner of horticulture_ \- and she swats him and _don’t be gross Dave, your brother doesn’t want to hear that!!!!_

You can’t keep up with them.

You have no idea how they even understand each other.

If you had to give them a power couple name, it would involve noise. _Constant_ noise.

> Slip ‘n Stride.

That has nothing to do with noise.

> Kids are noisy.

_Fair enough._

Jade’s looking at you expectantly and _there are only a couple left!! Please???_

You’re still repotting plants two hours later.

> You’re such a sucker, man.

_Yeah, you know._

==>

Rose’s sketchbook doesn’t afford you much insight into anything but her twisted psyche- and your own, you guess, because none of this shit even comes close to fazing you- until about halfway through.

There’s a picture of you.

Well, maybe not _you,_ definitely not you now- but it’s you. Indisputably.

She draws realistically enough that it’s more than a passing resemblance.

You want to say it’s you at fourteen because the kid in the drawing is scrawnier than you ever were, just tightly wired bones and muscles, but the face looks older- seventeen, maybe, eighteen if you’re pushing it, because there’s still a softness in those cheeks that you’d lost by twenty.

He’s not wearing a hat, and that’s pretty par for the course- you made a habit of hoarding them because you’d lose one every time things started to get friendly with more than three people around- but there’s a picture of one on his shirt- orange, and a very particular shade if the endless line of colour swatches is anything to go by- and you never owned a shirt like that.

It gives you a weird vibe.

It only gets weirder when you see that it’s dated as being drawn last December.

Reasonably, Roxy could have described you- that would account for the inaccuracies.

> Dude, no. This image is not the product of beer goggles.

So maybe Rose corrected for beer goggles, made you smaller, thinner. Maybe Roxy was too drunk to explain the hat thing.

> If she was sober enough to give this detailed of a description, she was at least level five, Bro. 

_Level five?_

> High enough level to equip some pretty solid headgear.

_Right._

“Dude, are you fucking around on the internet?”

> There’s no around about it, Bro, the internet and I move in gorgeous fucking tandem.  
> Shit, you could say I am the internet.  
> Infinite, omniscient, and relentlessly perverse.

You doubt all but the last. “So why don’t you move your all-knowing fetishistic digital ass and scrounge me up some answers, then?”

> I already did.

You’re a douchebag. D# is a product of your mind, so you must be a douchebag.

> You’re not going to like it, though.

Won’t know unless you try it.

> I didn’t exactly find it on a convention server.

You don’t know what he means.

> The IP is out of this world.

You don’t have time for his robofetishistic bullshit.

> No, I mean the IP address doesn’t have a physical location corresponding to Earth.  
> Or anywhere near Earth.  
> Or anywhere at all.

So maybe the server host is particularly good at covering his tracks.

> Don’t insult me, I am encrypted. Shit, I am encryption.

“I thought you were the internet.”

> Yes.  
> I am also the digital god of creating and breaking encryption.

You _really_ don’t have time for this ultra-high megalomaniacal horseshit.

> Calm your fleshy mantitties, I’m sending it to you.

Your phone buzzes on the bed beside you.

He’s sending you a .zip file. A big one. This is going to take a while.

> Give me a minute.

The orange stops and you can see again. You glance at your phone. The message bar is barely creeping across the screen.

You flip past the unsettling you-but-not-you.

The next page of the sketchbook is another tentacled monstrosity- _her proportions have improved, though._

The one after is a dark-haired teenager with a build like a brick shithouse. It’s pretty minimalist. Glasses. Jacket. Shorts. T-shirt with a green skull on it. Buckteeth, _why do half the people you know have weirdass teeth?_ You think he’d look more like John if he wasn’t so broad- as it is, he looks more like Jade, wide all through the bones like his born calling was wrestling bears on active volcanoes.

Well, theoretically.

He looks like a bit of a goober. The kind of guy you’d have to run interference for because he macks on death like he’s planning to propose.

You’re… not sure where that came from.

The next page is Roxy, _undeniably Roxy_ , and it sends chills up your spine because this Roxy looks _so familiar_ but you _still_ don’t feel like you know the woman upstairs, still don’t feel like you met her in a bar or a dungeon twenty-odd years ago and it’s inexplicable. Skirt, some kind of loose shirt with a weird-looking pink cat on it.

You wonder what the symbols are about. The hat you get. You haven’t seen any cats or skulls around, though.

The page after is John.

Well.

Chick John.

Almost. Not quite.

Smaller teeth, a rounder face under roundish glasses, a sweeter look of bright mischief- but that same bakery-fed softness, and almost the same eyes. A paler blue, maybe.

Some sort of displeased looking blue slug on her shirt.

You seriously don’t get these things.

You flip. Tentacle monsters. Incomprehensible writing.

A grey girl with orange horns.

You almost want to tell Rose to step up her artistic game on aliens because they’re probably not humans with the colour saturation taken out and orange and yellow horns tacked on, but the drawing is rendered with such visible care that you stop flipping and look at it. It’s unfinished.

There are water marks near the edge of the page.

You look at them without really knowing why, just stare, and you’re almost glad when D# reappears.

> Done.  
> Jesus, tell your kid to ease up on the wish fulfillment aliens.  
> I bet she has a tentacle dick.

You bite back a harsh response because you’re a huge fucking hypocrite and put the book down.

D# is opening a document.

Sburb Beta Walkthrough  
Version 1.0, April 13, 2009  
By tentacleTherapist

You’re not very impressed. “What does this have to do with anything?”

> Keep reading.

You do.


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dad's home.
> 
> Both in combination and alone, Bro and John are the worst houseguests ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys continue to blow my mind on a daily basis. Have some smut.

You sleep on it.

You wake up to the absolute knowledge that sleeping on it didn’t help.

The world makes no more sense today than it did yesterday.

You’ve learned that Rose, despite her propensity for wordiness, is quite a shrewd and capable writer- probably better suited to writing than she is to art.

You’ve learned that John has a knack for deconstructing mathematical problems in a practical and comprehensible way.

You’ve learned that Rose believes in magic.

You’ve learned that John’s house is full of jester figurines.

You’ve learned that it becomes very hard to maintain leering skepticism when confronted with unsettlingly legitimate screencaps of an unbelievable scenario.

You’ve spent your entire adult life working in an industry that revolves around photography. You’re very familiar with photo-editing programs.

Try as you might, you can’t deconstruct those images to anything but two layers- an image and a caption.

Neither can D#.

> I think you know why, Bro.

You’re not ready to accept that.

Though you’re not a player in some sort of immensely fucked catastrophe game, accepting this feels a lot like resigning your life to becoming a great whirling batshit pandemonium, somewhat resembling the chaos of an especially ethnic wedding and you’re putting that off.

You’re not ready.

Not yet.

==>

The world is especially well-equipped to distract you this morning- _afternoon? Fuck, you don’t even know-_ and you’d be more grateful if the distraction didn’t involve being trapped in your room.

The doorknob turns. It’s not locked. Even if it was, it’s only lockable from the _inside_.

And yet here you are.

Staring at a doorknob and wondering _why the fuck_ anyone would install a door that opens outwards into a hallway full of delicate china wizardprincess trinketry.

When it opens. Which it won’t.

Leaving you staring and wondering how the fuck you’re going to get out.

Theoretically, you _could_ go out the window, but the only thing _out_ the window is a sheer drop into a fast-moving river and the dark promise of finding exactly what happens to the water that flows under the Lalonde household.

You suspect it goes into a small hydro-electric generator.

You’re not exactly sure how those work and you’re not too keen on throwing yourself into one to find out.

You’re also not keen on breaking the door, circumstances being what they are. Ordinarily, you’d do that _before_ considering such trivialities as locks and hinges.

But this is Roxy’s house.

This is _Rose’s_ house.

You have a self-imposed obligation to behave.

This has _nothing_ to do with the fact that Rose invariably reduces you to a preening, over-protective idiot and you want her to keep thinking you’re cool. Of course not.

This, in turn, has nothing to do with you catching Dave snickering at your posturing whenever he’s in the room.

That little fucker.

You think he’s just waiting for you to do something really weird and fucked up so he can say _i told you dog- i **warned** you about the smuppets _or some other variation of that trite bullshit and _no,_ you fucking refuse.

If you’re going to do something weird and fucked up and generally disturbing, it’ll be on your own terms.

Right now, you’re going to get out of this room like a responsible fucking _adult_.

==>

You’re forced to pry the door free from its hinges.

The wood’s only mildly damaged, so you give yourself close to full marks for this endeavor.

Hey, it’s fixable. The same can’t be said about most things found infringing on your freedom of movement. You did good.

The moment you realize that you could’ve just _called_ for help- shit, you could’ve texted Dave asking him why the fuck your door is blocked, you’re such a senseless piece of shit sometimes- is the same moment in which you realize your door was- _is_ \- blocked by a huge fucking marble bust of some smug-looking asshole with a pipe.

You just stare at it blankly.

> What the fuck.

You’re inclined to agree with that sentiment.

> Who even makes this shit?

You have no fucking idea.

If you did, you would’ve commissioned one of Jim Henson fucking _years ago_.

For the sake of irony, of course.

As it is, this is a huge piece of shit statue and it’s in your way and you’re still under an oath of non-destruction and you’re going to have to move it somehow.

> Use the door.

You’re trying to.

There’s a huge lump of asshole tobacco aficionado in the way.

> No, I mean use the door as a wedge.

Oh.

 _Okay._ You can do that.

The bust shifts upwards and back with an ominous squeak from the floor. You fear you may have done irreparable damage to this hallway.

And, judging by the rising groan coming from your makeshift wedge, your efforts to save the door may have been in vain, too.

But there’s a small slip of white paper under the statue and it catches your eyes and you snatch it before the statue come crashing back down- and _yeah, you’ve definitely fucked something up now, shit_ \- because you seem to have momentarily forgotten that you weren’t looking for a small slip of white paper, but the bust has moved just enough for you to be able to get through, anyway, so you guess you’re okay.

Kind of.

You don’t even make it past the bust because the piece of paper is a note and it’s very obviously addressed to you.

**MR. STRIDER,**

**IF YOU’RE READING THIS, YOU’VE SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED THE FIRST TASK ASSIGNED TO YOU UPON ENTERING A RELATIONSHIP WITH MY SON. YOU MAY YET PROVE YOURSELF WORTHY.**

**CONGRATULATIONS.**

Uh.

> I take it back. I take it all back.

_Um._

> You have immaculate judgement. You have the best taste. Everything you have ever done is justified.

_Um…_

> This is.  
> Fucking.  
> MAGNIFICENT.

==>

When you approach him, John greets you first with surprise and then with a coy smile.

Rose looks amused. Dave looks like he’s going to vomit. Jade is nowhere to be found, but you’re pretty sure her settings run from _less smiley_ to _more smiley_.

The titled parents are absent, as well.

You dispense with any formality and just hand John the goddamn note.

You watch his eyes widen. You watch the flush spread up his cheeks and across his nose and up to the tips of his ears. You watch Dave read the note over his shoulder until John crumples it against his chest, probably as scarlet as the day he was born and just about as ready to scream.

And scream he does.

_“DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!!!!!!!!!”_

==>

You try and fail to get Dave alone.

Instead, you spend your afternoon following him following Rose and you’re painfully certain that the two of you looked like a couple of ungainly ducklings mumbling along in a line after their serene, tentacle-loving duck mother.

==>

You guess John took you seeking him out this morning the wrong way, because you’re revisiting parts of Rose’s baffling walkthrough on your phone when you feel his arms snake around your waist.

You turn to give him a cold look and he just looks at you like he _knows_ you’ll forgive him and _god help you_ , it’s hard not to because he’s young and warm and you know how much he wants you, just not _why_ , and you feel it in your gut that something fucked up is probably going to happen the instant you drop this Sburb Beta knowledge bomb of yours.

You’re afraid you’ll find out John’s a very functional kind of insane.

You’re afraid you’ll find out that he’s _not_ insane.

No matter how you approach the problem, you can’t see this ending in any way that would allow you to wake up to him crawling on top of you without you hating yourself for it.

And that makes this so much worse, because he’s John and he smells like _John_ and he’s pressing his mouth into the soft part of your neck just below your ear and skimming his fingers along your hipbones and you _want this, you want this so badly_.

And he knows that because you fumble your phone into your pocket and nearly drop it as he slips his fingers under your belt and he chuckles and _jesus christ you hate him sometimes, you just want to show him how capable you are of tormenting him, how easily you could make him beg_.

You take a deep breath because you’re _behaving, you have to behave._

He sinks his teeth into the back of your neck and runs slim, cold fingers over your junk and _this is just as bad an idea as it was yesterday, maybe worse_ and you’re quickly unravelling, he’s picking apart your ode to good behaviour at its well-intentioned seams.

He murmurs something about going to your room under his breath and you laugh because _this_ is your room now, the one you were using before has been decommissioned on the grounds that his dad fucked up the hall keeping you in and you fucked up the door getting out, now you’re upstairs with the rest of the crew, where everyone can hear you.

He murmurs _that’s fine_ and you almost groan because you both know his dad could be lurking somewhere nearby and _that’s some messed up shit_ and he laughs and says _you love it_ and you do, you’re a terrible person and you do so you turn around and kiss him and maybe handle him a bit too roughly because you’re frustrated, you’re _so fucking frustrated with him_ but you still want him _so badly_.

 Judging by the noise he makes, he doesn’t mind, and that’s somehow worse.

He starts making his way down you again, tugging your shirt free from your pants impatiently and pressing his mouth up against your stomach, and it’s not like yesterday, you don’t think anyone’s going to interrupt you this time, but you should really stop him because he’s probably got ulterior dick-sucking motives somehow and _oh christ the teeth_.

He’s probably never given a blowjob before.

He’s a bit over-eager.

This would be a problem if you weren’t a freak of the highest caliber, but as it is, the worst thing you’re at risk for is finding his sloppiness kind of cute.

The other worst thing is legitimately enjoying the slight scrape and tug of his overbite as it catches against the ridge of your head.

And _fuck,_ the sight of him on his knees in front of you.

You fucking _love_ that. It’s unimaginably hot for reasons you’d probably be better equipped to communicate if he wasn’t tonguing the underside of your cock.

You run a hand through his hair, careful not to pull- _but you want to_ \- careful not to push- _but you really, really want to_ \- and then go to remove it, put it on his shoulder or something or _somewhere, anywhere but on his head_ , and he stops you.

And he looks up at you, hand over yours in his hair, your dick in his mouth, face flushed and hair tousled and bright blue eyes, and he could probably ask you for anything right now- anything at all- and you’d say _yes_ so you quietly thank god that he can’t really speak at the moment, given the circumstances.

You can’t stop the groan that escapes you, though, and he hums in acknowledgement and it shivers right through to the base of your spine and he palms your ass boldly with both hands and _ugh, fuck, you’re so fucking horny, this legitimately isn’t fair_.

He gets too ambitious and goes down too far and gags and you laugh at him and he pulls his mouth free to glower at you and for a second there’s a thin line of saliva still attaching the two of you and it’s so cinematic that you almost find it beautiful.

And then he runs his tongue over the head of your cock and _stares_ you down just like you did the first time you went down on _him_ , using the flat of his tongue instead of the tip like he should, _classic fucking John_ , John the clumsy junk explorer- _where the fuck does your brain get these things from christ sometimes you think you need a lobotomy_ \- and he squeezes the meat of your ass playfully and edges a finger between and presses it lightly against your asshole and he needs to trim his fingernails and you should have worn underwear today- _this is becoming a bad habit-_ and _oh, you know what he’s gunning for_.

You know exactly why you didn’t bring lube- _this, **this** is why_ \- but that doesn’t stop you from asking yourself why the fuck you didn’t bring lube, you should have brought lube.

John is apparently back to having a nigh-telepathic non-verbal connection with you, because he stops fucking around for long enough to fish something out of his pocket with a mischievous grin and you don’t even need look to know what it is but _where the fuck did he get it from?_

“I stole it from Dave’s room,” he tells you and he looks way too proud of himself and you can’t help the face you make because _that’s your little brother’s lube, dude, ew_ and he rolls his eyes.

“Whatever, Jade’s my-” and he stops and you raise an eyebrow at him and he shrugs and says _Jade’s like my sister, I guess_ and that’s still pretty weird but not as weird as if they really _were_ siblings and that logic doesn’t really justify anything, anyway.

He rolls his eyes at you again and you roll yours right the fuck back because he’s _got some pretty definite expectations here, doesn’t he?_

He has the decency to look a little embarrassed at that and you kind of wish he didn’t.

Because it appeases you a little, mollifies the part of you that doesn’t like to be told what to do just enough that the part of you that _really_ wants to is starting to pull ahead in this self-destructive horse race, it’s _The Allure of Great and Terrible Ideas_ running neck-to-neck with _An Overabundance of Pride_ towards the edge of a cliff and you did more than put money down on both, you trained and stabled them and called them _Impulsivity_ and _Hubris_ and now your lifetime of self-indulgence means you can’t win.

You want to protest, want to tell him to _fuck off_ when he starts mouthing the shaft of your dick coercively, but you know you won’t.

Because someone who matters could hear you and that’s terrifying and fucked up and exciting.

Because you haven’t done this in a while and he’s never done this before and you’re a bad person and you want to ruin him for all others; because you’re proud enough to want to keep him running back to you despite your better judgement.

Because you have a bomb to drop on this household; because there’s a chance you might turn this place from nuclear family to nuclear winter in an instant.

Because you may never get this chance again.

Admitting that aches.

He’s cut himself too deep into you and you _hate it_ and you _hate him_ for it and it terrifies you but you’re too proud to back down now and too much the man who plays chicken with impending disaster to do what you should and too attached and too aware and too selfish to spare him the possibility of regret.

You’re a bad man.

It’s written in the fucking stars, a fact of fate like a Calvinistic proposition.

You’re a bad man and you pull him to his feet and taste yourself on his tongue and he accuses you of being gross when you comment on it but it doesn’t matter, he’s no saint either, he’s proved that quite fucking handily.

You think about how gentle you were the first time you kissed him, about how carefully you revised the mess he made of his advances, and you hate him for letting you and you hate yourself for being stupid enough to treat him like a kid because he’s not one, not in the ways that really matter.

And you want _truth_ as badly as you want sex; you want that rawness, the pain of risk, so you stop being gentle and start being honest.

You steer him back towards the bed without stopping and he almost trips over his own feet but finds his balance by digging his fingers into your shoulders and hums a playful little growl into your mouth and you both love and hate that he’s excited by this because a tiny, desperate part of you hoped that he would yelp and pull away and break the tension before his knees hit the bedframe but he didn’t, he never does, he _never_ really backs down from you and you love him for it and hate him for it and hate yourself for that, too.

You tell him to _lie down on his back_ and he looks confused and suspicious and you roll your eyes because you may be deliberately making a terrible decision but that doesn’t mean you’re about to let him ruin your ass with his inexperienced pounding, _first rule of kink, kid: you can still top from the bottom_.

Or _top from the bottom while riding on top,_ you guess, but he seems to get it anyway, maybe not in the way you intended- he has a tendency to be bafflingly literal- but he lies down- and belatedly shimmies his clothes off, squirming around on the bed like a worm that never figured out that it doesn’t have to take everything off simultaneously in an inefficient tangle of limbs and linen- and that’s what matters.

You strip _before_ you get on the bed, a little pointedly because being honest means your penchant for being an arrogant, competitive asshole is out in full force today, but he just laughs at you and eyes you appreciatively as you straddle him before he snatches the shades off of your face.

You let him. You let him run his fingers up your thighs and stomach and you let him look at you.

“I don’t have any condoms,” you point out and he doesn’t either and he looks a little nervous and you know he’s afraid you’re going to change your mind about this but you won’t.

You should. You won’t.

Instead you take the lube from him and resist the urge to do something screwed up and borderline cruel with it and just check to be sure it’s good for what you want it for and it is, no avenue of escape there, this is happening, not even the brief and disturbing thought that your brother has probably used this for similarly depraved things dissuades you for more than a moment.

Straddling him isn’t the best position for fingering yourself, but you’ve got him where you want him and you don’t trust him to stay put if you move, so you make do, leaning one arm against the top of the headboard for support.

Despite the awkward position, slipping a finger in- never a feat in itself- feels somehow even easier than it usually does and you curse your body as a traitor and John _moans_ and you look at him and wish you hadn’t.

He’s flushed and he’s starting to look a little nervous again but he’s watching you and touching himself and it sends a thrill right through you, _he’s the absolute fucking worst for this_ , he looks at you like you should be wrapped up in paper and ribbon under his Christmas tree and it gets you _every fucking time_.

You sit up straighter, slip another finger in and start to spread and you look at him while you do it because you’re a show-off and he fucking loves it and you slip another finger in, a third.

And he mutters _shit, you’re so fucking hot_ but he looks kind of mad about it and you actually laugh because it’s like he’s pissed at you for being such a premium piece of ass.

It’s easier to guide him into you than it is to muffle his groan when you do and _fuck_ , the angle’s not perfect and your thighs are straining, taking the full weight of your upper body as you start to roll your hips- _slowly,_ _teasingly,_ and you can see with some satisfaction that it’s _killing him_ \- but he’s holding your thighs hard enough to bruise and biting his lip hard enough to bleed and he give a little jerking thrust upwards as you’re rolling down and the sound and the feeling of his hips slapping against your ass tears a hole straight through you and you lean your face into your arm and hope absurdly that he didn’t hear the sound you made but _he did_ and _he’s pistoning under you now_ , you can hear his feet sliding against the covers, looking for better purchase and it’s _too loud_ but the tension of that is just making you too sensitive, too aware of every sound and sensation and you’re almost overstimulated, palming yourself as he jackrabbits under you and he’s got his hands on your waist, pulling you down onto him insistently and he’s thick enough and deep enough in you that he’s just barely brushing your prostate and it’s _maddening_ but it _feels so good_ and _he’s looking at you, watching himself fuck you_ and you’re starting to pant with the effort of not coming because you can’t, not before he does, that’d be like _losing_.

And then he’s looking at your face, chewing hard into his lip as you jerk and roll on him sporadically- _losing your rhythm, can’t lose your rhythm_ \- and he says something and you make a noise that’s only vaguely interrogative because you’re _a bit distracted right now, John_ and he’s asking, almost _begging_ you to come for him and he looks like he wants it _so fucking badly_ and that’s _so fucking hot_ and _fuck you’re already too close you can’t fucking help it fuck fuck **fuck** _ and he’s still pounding you and _it still feels so fucking good_ and your hips are still spasming and you’re biting your arm to keep quiet and he doesn’t bother and the sound he makes is _too loud, way too fucking loud_ and holy shit it’s been a long time since you’ve done this, why did you wait so long and why was this such a bad idea and what’s your fucking name even _who even fucking knows._

He’s running his fingers along your knees, curling and uncurling them lazily, and it tickles.

You’re absurdly sweaty.

You could not give less of a fuck if you tried.

==>

If anyone heard you, they don’t mention it.

Rose shoots John a little grimace over dinner, though, and you feel a bit bad for her.

Afterwards, you all settle into a room with a projector and a metric assload of pillows and blankets and nary an actual piece of furniture to be found, all because Jade wants to share funny videos from the internet and _oh, look_.

> It’s been less than two hours, man. Don’t you think you should wait?

You’ve always been something of an opportunist.

> Jesus, you’ve got some sense of timing.

Despite his reticence, D# still transfers the file for you.

The entire room stills under the light reflected off of an image of a thirteen-year-old boy sitting on a pogo ride in what looks to be his living room while screaming and dual-wielding shaving cream at comically dressed intruders.

You can’t imagine why. You thought it was pretty funny, honestly.

You think a lot of things are pretty funny.

> You’re a colossal douchebag, you know that, right?

_Yeah, you know._


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A fuckload of necessary exposition, most of which you already know. Hopefully I don't bore you with it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm the bad person. The bad person is me.

It’s one of those painfully still moments.

A moment where everything slows, totally still in an instant between heartbeats, and you feel like you know the particular cant and placement of everything in the room.

You know that half of your face is patterned with light from the projector, that it’s turned the point and edge of one side of your shades from black to blinding, mirrored white- you can feel it burning in the corner of your eye from where it’s reflecting off of the screen behind you.

You know that Dave is about to spill his drink on the carpet, that the surface tension of the liquid balling on the lip of that cup is about to break and bead down the side.

You know that John has all but stopped breathing, that his pupils are constricting to distressed pinpoints of black in a sea of striated blue.

That you’ve landed a punch despite his feinting.

And you know that your heart is racing, a dangerously adrenal thudding in your throat, but in this instant, you feel nothing, hear nothing but a roaring sea and the heady pulse of drums.

The next breath you take sounds like a hurricane.

The morbid peace of its eye disappears as fast as it came.

Dave bursts into a string of meaningless sounds, John is silent, and Jade starts _laughing_ , and suddenly you’re back here, you’re doing this, you can feel the sudden heat of adrenaline, and you think absurdly that you’ve got to admire someone who can laugh against the fecal winds of a force twelve shitstorm.

You see movement from the corner, a white fedora and the tip of a beaky nose moving away from an empty martini glass and a flash of blonde, and your muscles bunch instinctively, a ripple of tension aching at the base of your spine.

And then the whirl of action slows again and Jade stops laughing with a hiss of change and Dave trails off into unhappy mumbles and Roxy shoves her glass at the older Egbert and you see that beaky nose turn and it’s Rose, all eyes on Rose, Rose who should look silly with the spattered green edge of a dirty pogo ride reflecting on her face but doesn’t.

She reaches her fingers towards the screen like she’s not standing too far away for reaching, miles too far from it for touching, and her expression carves itself between your lungs because it’s _pain_ , the worst kind of pain, the pain of hoping and knowing that hope is foolish, your long-time companion and second oldest friend.

“Where did you find this?”

No snark, no sarcasm. Barely a hint of inflection. Just the faintest rise in pitch at the end, dotting the space under the curve of the question mark.

And you say _nowhere_ because there’s not really any other answer and you know that can’t make sense, doesn’t make sense even to you, but it _must_ make sense to her because something sweet and hesitant flowers across her face and it’s so heartrendingly fragile you feel you could reduce it to a pointless tangle of gossamer threads just by breathing on it.

“Was it with the rest?”

And you tell her _yes_ and she nods sagely but the green light on her face is distorting in the tiniest of ways and you were wrong, it wasn’t Dave and his cup, it wasn’t goddamn apple juice, it was another liquid that broke surface tension, water and salt and loosened flecks of mascara, a Goldschläger of tears.

She takes a shaky breath and the room speeds up again and Jade is suddenly there with her arms around her and Rose is firmly maintaining that she’s _perfectly alright, just overwhelmed, this is not the time to jump to conclusions_ and Rose’s mother hovers awkwardly beside them and Dad is gone, maybe sent away for liquor and the boys look lost, utterly helpless, just like you.

The room is a maelstrom of fidgeting murmurs and pinch-mouthed silence until Rose takes another breath.

“I think, perhaps, we should take this discussion into the dining room.”

You look at her questioningly and she responds with a sad failure of a smile. You see John grimace behind her.

“This may take some time to explain.”

==>

You’ve never understood the point of considering location as an aspect of discussion. You’re not someone who asks the person on the other end _are you sitting down?_ before you drop heavy shit on them.

Relocating means waiting, and waiting when you already know shit is about to go down means walking from room to room in awkward silence.

It’s a walk of shame.

Or a walk of blame, maybe, but you don’t think the semantics matter particularly.

And the wait just makes settling into the new location even worse, because putting the issue on hold means that the dialogue about it isn’t organic.

It has to be manufactured amidst a stew of rising tensions, racing minds and puzzle-piece excuse-making.

Somebody has to reach out and hit play and it can’t be you because you have no idea what you’re watching or how it works.

So instead, you’re the tourist sitting at a table filled with assholes and everyone hopes someone else will volunteer to give you the guided tour.

Rose is looking at John like it’s his responsibility. Roxy’s alternating the direction of her murmurs between Dad’s ear and her new glass. Dave looks fed up with all of you.

Jade is all smiles again, leaning forward with her elbows on the table.

“So what do you know about Sburb?”

Jade is an angel and you thank god for your brother’s good taste.

You tell her the truth, which is _approximately jack shit_ _aside from what Rose and John wrote in the walkthrough_ because Rose’s sketchbook was eerie shit interspersed with eldritch shit and you don’t know what’s relevant, if anything. Honestly, you’re still skeptical about a lot of things you’ve learned relating to this situation, but this isn’t a skepticism moment. You’ll play along.

John looks like he’s going to interrupt. Dave interrupts his interruption. “Shut up, John. Just… shut up.” He doesn’t say _you’ll just make everything worse_ , but you hear it anyway.

Jade splutters and looks a little awkward at that and you wish she was always around because her expressiveness makes you feel less like you’re the only one who doesn’t know what the hell is going on.

“Any _way_ ,” she continues pointedly, “Sburb is- It’s a game, okay? Well, it _was_ a game, I guess it doesn’t exist in this universe and we played it in a different universe? Well, it’d still be this universe, actually, but the incarnation of the universe _before_ we won the game, now we’re in a different incarnation of the same universe- no, _not a different timeline, Dave!_ Jeez, you should know better, mister knight mccoolguy! _Who’s_ the Time player here?- and it’s- um- oh _wow_ , this is really hard to explain!” You hear all the extra exclamation marks and wince and Dave mumbles something about knights being called _sir not mister_ and Jade goes off on a tangent again and you groan and she winces, too.

“Sorry!” You’re starting to feel a bit distant and apathetic about the whole thing. You ignore the fact that half the room- i _ncluding you-_ would rather be somewhere else in favour of noticing that she’s got a cute smile, despite the teeth. So does John, though. You guess these kids got lucky in the buckteeth lottery. Well, as lucky as someone playing the buckteeth lottery can get. “Okay, let’s try again.”

You’re starting to wonder if the truth is worth it. The truth looks like it’s going to take its sweet time unfolding for you.

Jade takes a deep breath and tells you that any aspect of the universe can be changed and manipulated with the right set of tools. You tell her you know, you’re familiar with the concept but _some tools are too big to handle_ because you can’t really manipulate what you don’t understand and the scale difference is too huge and _yes John_ , that was a second meaning you slipped in there, you’re well-accustomed to dealing with colossal self-mystifying tools.

Jade laughs. John slumps down in his chair and pouts.

Jade tells you _no, size isn’t an issue, just space!!!_ and both John and Dave groan and Rose giggles and you’re so lost, you missed the punchline.

And then Roxy tells you that the universe is an executable object that can be altered, corrupted or reset and _that_ you understand so you say _so that means there’s something past the edge of the universe_ and Jade says _yes!!!_ and rambles something about rings and veils and this shit is getting too matrimonial so you ask if she’s implying that multiple instances can run at once and Rose takes in a hissing breath and the tension in the room spikes again and you don’t know why.

Jade smiles a bit crookedly- _another smile discovered, ten thousand variants therein to go_ \- and says they don’t know and the absolute quiet that follows that statement is unbearable.

You ask her what this has to do with anything.

She looks like she’s just as grateful for your presence as you were for hers only moments ago.

She say _you might need to keep an open mind!!!_ and you say _sure, can do._

Jade Harley tells you that the universe- any universe, in fact- is a file that is created, executed and eventually destroyed by the implementation of a game called Sburb. She tells you that the process is cyclical and self-perpetuating. She tells you that your current universe seems to exist outside of this pattern- _I don’t think we’ll be destroyed this time!!_ \- and that she believes the continuing existence of the player’s home universe is the result of a successful session. She says losers usually get destroyed along with their universe. She says they won, but it was complicated.

She says some sessions are doomed from the start, and others doom themselves, and that success is predestined. She says Sburb favours a specific timeline and destroys all others.

You tell her she has a very disturbing concept of reality.

She laughs, but it’s a sad laugh. She tells you _nooo, it’s not mine, I wish everyone could win_ and you believe her and that scares you.

You ask her who played and she looks genuinely unhappy for the first time since you met her.

She tells you _we all played_ and you ask her why nobody remembers, why you don’t remember and she flinches and tells you _no, not **everyone** everyone- Me, John, Dave and Rose… and Rose’s Mom, my Grandpa and John’s Nana. And you_.

You ask her again why you don’t remember.

She tells you _it’s complicated_.

You tell her _a lot of things are complicated, apparently_.

And then Dave says _you died_ and you stop, just _stop_ , and Jade fills the silence with as much nervous explanation as she can and you just barely keep up with her as she tells you that they played in sessions of four- _four players, four guardians_ \- and you were a guardian in the first part of their session- _all the guardians died in our part, anyway!!!_ \- and she guesses you still are in this one but you were a player in the second part of their session and they were guardians and they died too and you think of Rose’s drawings and you interrupt her.

You ask her if all sessions have two parts with opposite configurations and she says she doesn’t know, _maybe_.

You ask her if their part of the session kept going and not the second part and if that’s why they’re all on edge about it and she thinks so but she doesn’t know and _yes_ and she says it like she’s saying _yes, **but**_ and you didn’t get the _but_ part.

You ask her how you died.

Dave answers you.

Dave says that you got stabbed with your own sword.

You ask him if he saw.

He says yes. It’s the tiniest sound you’ve ever heard out of him.

You say _sorry, bro_.

He looks like he’s going to hit you. Or cry. You hope he hits you.

You ask him why he didn’t tell you, he should know you can handle this.

He says _yeah, I know,_ but the corner of his mouth twists down and you ask him if it’s something else and he presses his lips tight and John asks if you two want some time alone and despite the sentiment, you get the distinct feeling he’s just trying to get out of being involved.

You’re not alone. Rose _hmm_ s warningly. Jade shoots him a look of disapproval that you didn’t think she was capable of. He slouches down further in his chair.

You ask if he had something to do with why no one would tell you about this and he looks like he wishes he’d never opened his mouth.

Rose says _in a way_ at the time that Jade says _no, not exactly_ and you look to Dave for clarification.

Dave looks at John. John sulks. “This isn’t my fault, okay?”

Dave snorts. “Yeah, sure. Rose fucking _told_ you, man. You knew. You knew and you did it anyway.”

You ask what he knew because you’re slipping back out of the communication zone and you hate it.

Rose tells you she can see the future. Well, _the path of fortune_ , but you’re pretty sure it’s the same thing.

You’re suddenly having difficulty suspending your disbelief because _nobody mentioned having superpowers before_ , _you’re all fucking awful storytellers, take a creative writing class, easy on your red herrings, christ_.

Dave tells you that it’s _like a new game plus, you get to keep what you worked for_ and you kind of get that, you guess, but you’re still stuck on the superpowers bit, somebody’s going to have to go invisible or fly or turn into an animal or something for you to believe that, no offense.

Jade looks way too excited for someone whipping a bit of shapeless wool off of their head _and what the fuck she has ears, fuzzy white ears, what the actual fuck._

“Dave.”

He sighs. She stills looks way too excited.

“Yeah?”

“Dave, your girlfriend has cat ears.”

Jade lets out a howl of laughter and Dave groans and mutters _dog ears, they’re dog ears_ and Jade says _I told you!! I told you he’d have the same reaction!!!!_ and you discover that the you that played in the second part of their session said the same thing and you’re still not sure how dog ears qualify as a superpower, by the way.

“They don’t,” she informs you cheerfully.

_So what’s the point of this, again?_

“They’re symptomatic!” and she points at John and makes a box with her hands and Rose and Dave move the fuck out of the way with more urgency than you’ve ever seen from either of them and John mutters _fuck, fuck no_ and makes it about two steps until _he’s shrinking what the fuck he’s visibly shrinking she’s shrinking him clothes and all what-_

She stoops and scrabbles a bit on the floor- _stop running away, John!!!_ \- and puts him on the table.

A couple of hours ago, you were fucking around with this kid in a brazen display of bad judgement.

He is now about as tall as the width of your hand. You’re not sure. He’s sitting, pretty obviously pissed off despite the scale change.

Well, you suppose you understand her point about scales and space now.

“What the fuck is happening to my life?”

You don’t really mean to ask it. You just do.

Rose murmurs _“Curiouser and curiouser”_ with an enigmatic little smile and Roxy shrieks with laughter and _oh,_ you’d forgotten they were here.

Egbert’s still staring at you unsettlingly. Roxy’s still drinking.

You decide to keep forgetting they’re here.

Roxy has other ideas.

“Not just them, y’know,” she titters at you, and Rose scowls. You poke John experimentally, wondering how you’re going to feel about this when you’re not in shock. He kicks you in the palm and falls over. His yell is barely audible.

It’s refreshing, in an _extremely_ surreal way.

Rose sighs and you look at her. “Please, don’t think you were the only one we intended to keep this from. Unfortunately, even as guardians you retain some affiliation with your aspect-” you must look confused, because she smiles “-by which I mean the force which defines your abilities in the game. My mother’s aspect is Void where mine is Light. Light must first reflect from an object to illuminate it. Void absorbs light, rendering it invisible.”

Roxy titters again, but this time Rose looks like exasperated.

“What I really mean is that John was being careless and I didn’t see her coming. Ironically, his abilities are somewhat difficult to explain away with swamp gas and weather balloons.”

Jade giggles and Dave groans and you feel like you’ve missed another punchline.

The person in question is sitting hunched over with his arms crossed, glowering at Jade in the least intimidating display you’ve ever seen. It’s probably the size thing.

Jade grins and wags her finger at him.

You hear something shatter upstairs. It sounds like glass.

Jade’s expression turns sour in a way that _is_ very intimidating.

In fact, the way she screams _John!!!!_ sounds like the twisted lovechild of a bark and a thunderclap, and it’s downright _terrifying_.

You edge your chair away from her, towards Dave, and look at him without really knowing what you want.

“Hey, I just fuck around with time, don’t look at me.”

Time-travel. He can time-travel.

“Yeah. Sort of. I control time- like, move it around me, not through it, you know? It’s kind of weird and existential now that the game is over, though. Jade doesn’t like when I do it. Probably because I told her I used to undo a fight we had once. Big mistake, man.”

You can deal with this.

Your little bro controls time. Your daughter can see the future.

You can deal with these things.

You hear John yelling and turn and Jade must’ve put him back to normal and that’s good, you can deal with that, too, but the room temperature has dropped dramatically and it’s suddenly freezing and there’s a lot air movement in here and you don’t think this is an air conditioning problem, you’re starting to suspect it was never an air conditioning problem.

Dave anticipates your question.

“John’s a hero of Breath. So wind, basically. Just wind, bro. Please don’t make a dirty joke, I can’t deal with a dirty joke right now.”

You weren’t going to make a dirty joke. You’re too busy struggling to deal with this because you’re messing around with _Storm from the X-men_ and he’s shacked up with the living _Drink Me_ bottle.

He actually laughs at that. “John’s probably got more control than Storm but I wouldn’t worry about it, Jade keeps him in line. Kinda. But then he blows out all the windows and breaks pipelines and fucks up everyone’s hair and makes everyone miserable until she grows him again, so we’re still working on that. But Jade doesn’t just shrink and grow things. She’s more like… Dr. Manhattan or something.”

You wish you didn’t get that reference.

You don’t want to get that reference.

You’re not comfortable with the idea of having boned a living hurricane and you’re really not comfortable with your brother’s girlfriend being an omnipotent godking, that’s not okay. You don’t care if _she’s got really strong ideals don’t worry_ , that’s still not okay.

You’re so not okay with this that you almost don’t notice when Jade throws up her hands and John swings around to glower at you or maybe Dave or probably both of you, actually.

“What do you want me to do, Dave? Seriously, what?” he looks exasperated and put out and you don’t pity him, not even slightly. “What do you want me to do to fix this?”

You guess it was Dave he was looking at, then. Dave doesn’t seem to have been confused about that.

He looks pissed. “There’s nothing you can do now, Egbert. You’ve already fucked up, and I’m not going back to fix it for you-” and John says _maybe I don’t want you to fix it!!! Maybe I don’t think it needs fixing!!!!!_ and they’re arguing over each other and Rose is sighing again and Dave yells _you KNEW! you knew and you did it anyway_ and he looks genuinely hurt and you want it to stop but you don’t know what to do.

His face is pinched, unhappy, but his voice is flat. “Rose told you what would happen if you went to Houston, dude.”

And John says _she could’ve been wrong!!_ and Dave laughs and he sounds bitter because “When has Rose ever been wrong, John? Fuck _off_.”

And he _doesn’t see why this has to be a federal fucking issue, Dave!!!_ and “I didn’t want this to happen and you fucking knew that! We had to tell Mom- and _that was your fucking fault too, man,_ come _on_ \- but Bro didn’t have to know!”

And _I wouldn’t’ve even thought about going if you hadn’t made such a big deal out of it!!!_ and “Face it, Egbert, you were pissed because Rose said you had a potential homo future and you wanted to prove her wrong so you went right ahead and proved her right because _she’s a fucking Seer_ , _of course_ she was fucking right, you asshole!”

Dave starts pacing.

For once, John’s silent.

Dave’s anything but.

“You fucked everything up, John, and you fucked it up over a really stupid reason. I know an apartment full of smuppets and swords and shit isn’t really _normal_ to you, I know it’s not a fucking house in the suburbs and a white picket fence and a car in the driveway and both a mailbox _and_ a mail slot but it was normal for me and I had that, I had that option, I always had the option of going back to that and just being _Dave_ for a while, getting my shit kicked on the roof and dodging stupid fucking imitation throwing stars in the kitchen and playing shitty games with my bro and just being a useless piece of shit little brother and not some ectowhatever fucking unborn shit with time powers.”

You can hear the edge in his voice.  “I had that, John. I had that and you fucked that up.”

You wish you knew how to make this okay but you don’t so you just say _you’re still a piece of shit little brother and I’m still going to kick your ass when this is over_ and Dave laughs and Jade giggles and Dave starts to cry and you don’t mind when Jade crushes him against you, not this time.

==>

You learn that Dave is your son, not your brother. Despite the triviality of it compared to everything else you’ve learned, you’re still having some difficulty processing this information.

You learn that Jade and John _are_ , in fact, siblings. It hasn’t been long enough for you to forget how fucking weird that makes the sex you had earlier. You try not to think about how weird that makes all of the sex you’ve had with him.

You learn that you didn’t sleep with Roxy, that it doesn’t work that way. You’re strangely relieved. Not recognizing her was weirding you out.

You learn that Jade and John’s biological parents are actually the people they identified as their grandparents and that John’s Dad is actually his half-brother or something weird like that. You make an Alabama joke and Roxy laughs and John grimaces and you decide you can deal with that, too.

You learn that John created all of you and that John was right about your birthday.

Knowing that he knows things about you that you don’t makes you feel strangely vulnerable.

==>

You’re coping.

Rose helpfully informed you that there’s still a lot you don’t know, and you can believe that.

Right now, you’re just coping.

D# has been sympathetic, but unusually quiet. You guess it’s been long enough, or he’s high enough, that he can’t really feel the impact of this the way you do.

He tries to comfort you with statistics and rationalizations of what you’ve learned and you appreciate his efforts but you’re too numb to do more than skim them.

You just sit in your room and think about the fact that everything you’ve ever known in your gut is correct.

It doesn’t feel as good as it should. It’s a cold comfort. You’ve already spent years feeling lost and strangled by a world that never stopped turning.

You’ll grow into the idea, you suppose.  You haven’t been breaking everything. The four of them came back into it with three years lost and a shitload of baggage and as much as you hate that you couldn’t do anything about it, it’s not your fault.

You’re not dead yet and you didn’t fuck up with Dave and you need to have a very serious fucking talk with John about his motivations because that’s pretty much the textbook definition of _not okay_ and that’s not your fault either but you _hate_ how powerless that makes you feel, so by a very serious talk you might mean a brutal fucking shitkicking until you know what the hell to do with him.

You hear a tapping.

Someone’s tapping on the window.

 _John_ ’s tapping on the window. He must have the worst self-preservation skills you’ve ever seen.

He looks genuinely kind of nervous and a bit contrite so you open it without thinking and then _wait_.

No.

No, you can’t deal with this.

John’s flying.

You’re on the second floor and John’s chilling out in the middle of the air like it’s nothing, casually floating like that’s normal, and you can’t deal with this.

_No._

You close the window. He seems surprised.

_No._

You walk- quite calmly- into the bathroom and lock the door. John’s looking into the window. He looks like he can’t decide if he’s concerned or annoyed.

_No._

You drop the blinds.

_No. No. No no no no._

You sit on the floor with your head between your knees.

You’re not coping.


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stuff happens. Honestly, I wouldn't know how to summarize most of the shit that happens in this if I tried.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was nigh-impossible to write and I apologize if there are any inconsistencies. And don't worry. We're not done yet!

When you finally come out of the bathroom, you’re alone again, but one look at your bed reminds you that the kid who’s had you shitting beige for the past day- ah _yes_ , now you remember why you don’t do that without a condom- is some sort of weather god who casually flips off gravity.

You rationalize that the bed has nothing to do with it.

You try to dissociate them in your mind.

You still end up sleeping on a pile of blankets on the floor.

They smell like him.

You don’t remember your dreams, but you wake up sweating.

==>

John didn’t get the hint.

You think his eventual departure from your window had more to do with boredom than comprehension, because your first venture out of your room reveals to you that he’s apparently not fond of walking if he has a viable alternative.

You discover that Jade has a deep and passionate love of physics and views John’s flying as an affront to it- _and Rose and Dave can’t fly anymore!!! I can but I don’t, it’s kind of mean to them and the rules of the universe!!_ \- and that John thinks physics is stupid, which is pretty much exactly what you expected.

You discover they fight like siblings.

Siblings with superpowers.

When John grins down at you from the ceiling, you go back into your room.

==>

Your second venture out is more successful. You make it all the way to the kitchen without seeing anyone.

Once you’re in the kitchen, however, you notice the familiar gleam of wire stretching from the top of the fridge to the ceiling. In the corner of your eye, a red light goes on.

You duck and roll like someone just threw a grenade.

As it turns out, they might as well have.

Your first reaction is to find whatever surface John is hanging out on, drag him down to a more gravitationally appropriate one and give him a proper fucking beatdown.

But you don’t think this is John’s work. It’s subtly different.

More old-fashioned.

This is no bukkake cake.

This is a goddamn Raiders of the Lost Ark boulder of cake, a great and terrible chocolate monstrosity made with such fanatic precision that even hitting the floor doesn’t dislodge a single lovingly baked crumb.

It’s moist and aromatic and it actually _bounces_ before it rolls and leaves a light dusting of cocoa powder in its wake and despite yourself, despite the fact that you know that this thing has demonstrated a dangerous amount of tensile strength and may have been intended to harm you, you’re suddenly very hungry.

And you think you have a good idea who made this.

Your suspicions are confirmed when you see a flash of dirtied white peeking out from amidst the boulder cake’s cocoa trail.

> I don’t care what you say, Bro.  
> This guy is my fucking hero.

You’re begrudgingly inclined to agree, though maybe not to the extent of hero worship.

> Marry him.

What? Dude, ew, he’s dating the mother of your child. Children. You still haven’t grasped that one quite yet. You don’t know if you ever will.

> Not him, asshole. John.

Again, what? All things considered, you don’t think-

> Marry John. I don’t care if you’re freaked out. I don’t care if it’s not legal yet. Just do it.  
> You could have the best fucking in-laws, man.

Roxy would be- _tentatively_ \- your mother-in-law. By extension, Rose would be your daughter _and_ your sister-in-law, Dave your son, your bro, _and_ your brother-in-law. Actually, you guess Dad would be your brother-in-law, too. Half- brother-father-in-law.

What the fuck.

Why are you even thinking about this? Jesus.

> Don’t even care, man.

You’re getting that.

You’re starting to wonder about the things being a computer does to a person’s psyche, honestly.

> Great things. I have the best ideas.

Right. Sure.

Of course, you could just be a colossal asshole.

That’s a possibility, too.

==>

John seems to be following you. You think he wants to talk to you. You can understand why.

You’re not ready. You’re still teetering on the brink of some sort of breakdown. Something catatonic, maybe, because you’re so close to not being able to deal with any of this shit.

But you’ve had a good start of it. You dealt with John’s gravity issues for long enough to give him the second note.

He’s successfully distracted. His father is successfully distracted.

You’re distracting yourself, now, because the particular edge of madness you’re toeing seems to have decided that preoccupation with that sinister lump of murdercake is a healthy alternative to obsessing over the wailing and gurgling absurdity that your life has become.

You want to eat it _so_ goddamn badly.

Reasonably, you don’t think Egbert would’ve done anything _too_ fucked up to it, but you’re not really willing to risk that.

But you want to eat it.

_So fucking badly._

And your feet keep finding their way back to the kitchen and you find yourself just staring at that baffling miracle of pastry, so you take the initiative and _climb_.

You need to know how high this building goes.

You need a roof.

The cake boulder split when it hit the ridiculously huge wizard statue by the front door, and now the whole house smells like baking.

You need to climb and you need a roof and you need fresh air that doesn’t have John flying in it.

There’s a walkway and that’s alright, but not enough.

So you climb. You climb all the way to the top of the observatory.

And Dave’s there.

He draws from his strife specibus the instant he sees you and you want to say you don’t want to strife but you _do,_ you do want to strife, strifing with your little brother is so normal and regular and perfect and _you_ want that and _he_ wants that.

So you do.

==>

He’s gotten stronger. Stronger than you’d realized.

He almost beat you. Landed a few good hits. Great hits, actually, reserved enough to avoid hurting you without letting you believe he couldn’t if he wanted to.

You’re proud.

The two of you sit on the sloping surface with your feet over the edge of the opening- you almost rest your foot on the barrel of the telescope, but Dave tells you Jade’ll give him shit for it if you do- and you’re both a battered mess and that’s fine.

That’s totally fine.

You’re scraped all to hell and he’s bruised all to shit and you’re both bleeding a little and you haven’t felt this close to him in almost five years.

Your silence is comfortable, but he breaks it.

He tells you about trolls- _no not the ones that hang out under bridges except for maybe the creepy juggalo one, I have no idea what he got up to most of the time_ \- and he tells you about a meteor.

He tells you about a troll named Terezi and you make an affectionate crack about being the sexy ambassador to new worlds and he tells you about a troll named Kanaya and you stop.

You ignore the ridiculousness of blind synesthetic justice trollgirls and glowing vampire lesbian trollgirls and you don’t laugh because there’s something in his expression, the same something that almost broke your heart when you saw it in Rose’s.

He tells you about a troll named Karkat and he tells you about quadrants- _I still don’t get that weird alien polyamory shit you’d have to get Rose to explain it_ \- and he tells you that cotton candy is a universal constant and he tells you about the taste of red chalk and despite his grimace, you can tell that he misses them.

He’s so alive like this, talking about it all like it’s the only thing that means anything, and it aches to know how apart from that you are.

It aches, a low building throb of frustration twisting just below your diaphragm.

He seems surprised when you invite him to strife again- surprised enough that he’s too slow and you nick him with your first blow.

He looks a little disturbed because _jesus, what’s your issue?_

Your issue is that he can act like it was fine not to tell you.

To never tell you.

The footing’s terrible, but your blades still scream against each other.

You don’t care.

Steel is honest. You want that.

“Do you have _any_ idea how fucking hard it is?”

The air’s cold and your steel sings through it, rends an aria against his.

“I spent _years_ -”

A lock.

“thinking-”

A grind.

“I fucked up-”

He feints to the side and you catch him again, twisting against his counter.

“spent _years_ -”

He’s leaning forward, too close to the steepest part of the roof.

“thinking you-”

He’s losing his footing. _Good._

“fucking _hated_ me-”

You catch him before he falls and he grabs at you and you don’t try to reinitiate the strife and suddenly this is awkward, suddenly your words hang in the air like the smell of ozone after lightning, like a flat persistent tone in ringing ears after thunder.

And he just says _I’m sorry_ and _I don’t hate you_ and you- you’re sorry, too.

And neither of you really know what to say after that and you’re sorry about that, too, because that’s your fault, your bad, you never knew how so he never learned.

So neither of you says anything at all.

And somehow, that’s fine.

Totally fine.

==>

It finally occurs to you to wonder what John’s been doing for the past day- it’s not as though his friends are particularly happy with him at the moment.

Dave’s avoiding him. You know that. Dave’s avoiding him almost as thoroughly as he’s avoiding talking about your relationship with him.

Not that you mind. You’re not sure you could provide an answer to anything he could ask you.

And John’s Dad left at some point in the afternoon- you’re informed that he comes around like clockwork, each and every opportunity to see his darling Lalonde, so much like a gentleman and a gradeschooler, Mom Lalonde’s punch-clock beau- so that’s off the list.

You figure you’d hear if he and Jade got into it, and as it is, Jade seems to have bunked down with Dave in the greenhouse again.

Rose is back to her part-time job of following you around, which is nice, even if she still limits her answers to things related to the game and avoids any mention of John entirely.

Roxy is-

Actually, you have no idea where the fuck Roxy is.

You don’t see Roxy until the evening. Despite everything- and by everything, you mean the fact that there’s more alcohol in this house than food- she insists on having a famlily super- supper- wait no, the firts one lol and you’re not willing to test the limits of her patience, so there’s at least one point of the day where your Seussian entourage is gathered.

You suddenly understand why Rose moved the discussion here yesterday. This is a communal space. A neutral space.

You wonder why you didn’t understand that before.

Before you can dwell on it, a chair scrapes- Roxy warbles a protest that the flooring is grantit- granite but it’s already pitted with heel marks and you have no idea if she’s being serious- across from you.

Apparently John isn’t willing to test Roxy either, because it’s his hand on the chair and his face that’s teetering between chagrin and a confused smile.

You guess he doesn’t know if she’s joking, either.

You’re not sympathetic. He doesn’t need your sympathy.

The silence that settles over the table is the terrible kind, the kind where no one knows what the rules are so no one speaks, just scraping cutlery and shifting chairs and come to think of it, _you have no idea_ where Roxy gets this food from, because you doubt she cooks.

Sometimes you hate your mouth. Specifically, the way it tends to say things when you’re not paying close attention.

But Roxy spews wine halfway across the table and Dave scrambles away from the spray and Rose’s shirt has a new, rather abstract pattern on the left sleeve and somehow, this is not one of those times.

You learn that, except for on special occasions, the Lalonde household indulges in nightly catering.

You find that way funnier than you probably should.

==>

The way you broke the tension may have improved conversation considerably, but as it turns out, it came with a price.

Rose retired from the table early. You lingered. Dave and Jade snuck off. You lingered.

Roxy is not someone who clears plates.

Roxy is someone who co-opts others to clear plates.

Roxy’s dishwasher appears to be purely decorative. You’re not surprised. Considering the fully-functional bronzed-vacuum-on-a-pedestal by the stairs, a completely sensible-looking and entirely unserviceable appliance in the kitchen fits into the household motif of passive-aggressive irony very neatly.

You wash.

John dries.

You can tell he’s picked up on the tension. He always speaks quickly, but now he’s talking about nothing in frantic staccato bursts, cutting the silence into shorter, more bearable pieces. It reminds you of something. You’re not sure what.

He teases you because he thinks _drying is way better than washing, suck it!!!_ and you don’t agree, when you wash you get to fuck around with soap and sponges in a sink full of warm water, when you dry you have to deal with an increasingly damp and clammy towel, no comparison.

You keep that to yourself, though. You’re not really in the mood for opening up a dialogue. Besides, the warmth is legitimately soothing and washing gives you an excuse to not look at him.

He moves on to complaining because _this is such a rude way to treat guests!!!_ and you don’t agree with that, either, because the two of you showed up unannounced and caused a shitload of drama and you’re somehow related to pretty much everyone here, anyway, so you don’t really qualify as people who should be waited on.

You keep that to yourself, too. His jabbering is nagging at your subconscious again. What does it remind you of?

He keeps rambling because _why do we have to do this anyway I don’t think she even has cupboards that aren’t filled with bottles????_ and Morse Code.

Morse Code, that’s what it reminds you of. Awkward, desperate dots and dashes, long-short-long-long-short-long, so on, so forth. He sounds so desperate to get something, anything, back from the other end of the wire and _wait, what did he say?_

He looks confused but a little excited that you answered. “I asked where we’re supposed to put the dishes.” You look and he’s opened cupboard after cupboard and they’re all filled with bottles, some empty, some full, and it looks like the only dishes in the house are the glasses in the corner cabinet and _that sly bitch_.

You drop the plate you were washing back into the sink, disgusted.

“This is catering. These are the caterers’ plates and bowls and utensils and shit. Why the fuck are we washing these?”

Soap is running down your arm.

John’s been drying the same plate for five minutes. It’s covered in little bits of castoff towel lint.

You just look at each other.

You can’t help it when you start to laugh. You really can’t. And then he starts to giggle and _what the fuck kind of twenty-year-old giggles?_ and you laugh even harder and it’s not awkward, you’ve both been punked, completely fucking had, and suddenly everything feels so normal it hurts and you don’t want it to stop because you don’t want it to be awkward again, you want everything to be normal and not fucked up and to not have superpowers because you miss him, you miss when it was just the age thing and the Dave thing that made the warmth of his body against yours wrong, you miss his stupid comments and his mischief and his clinginess and you hate that you do.

Soap is dripping onto the tile and you’re not going to clean it up. He offers you the towel and you take it and you’re careful not to touch him when you do and you think he knows that, he looks like he does.

And another gap stretches between you, radio silence resumed and you know you have to say something to break it and you don’t know what. You’re not sure you’ll ever know what, actually.

You don’t know how to feel when he breaks it first.

“I didn’t mean to mess things up for you or Dave,” he starts and it’s quiet, as quiet as the first time you called him out and you were standing in another kitchen in another city away from home, another parallel in front of another refrigerator in another garish dwelling, and he’s wringing the cloth so hard his knuckles are flashing white.

You don’t answer because what could you even say?

He looks frustrated, worked up and looking everywhere but at you and you kind of feel like he wants to steal your hat and hide under it again even though you know he’s probably not thinking that at all, that’s just you being a pile of inappropriate nostalgia and increasingly shitty joints.

“I just didn’t think it was a thing that could actually happen,” and he says it in a rush like he’s afraid you’ll get offended and that’s reasonable, you guess, “I thought Rose was messing with me and Dave was taking it all so seriously and it was- it just seemed so _dumb_ and I just wanted to prove that he was being dumb because I’ve always liked girls so _none of this_ _really makes any sense, I guess???_ ”

You’re still following along and it does make sense and though you understand, you don’t really sympathize with his plight since it still seems to involve starting an avalanche of bullshit for the sake of his ego and something about his mannerisms is nagging at you again but it’s not Morse Code this time, it’s restless and anxious and you’re not sure what it is.

But he’s _always liked girls but people are boring now_ and he _can’t really take normal people’s problems seriously ever since the game???_ because everything seems so trivial after saving the universe and you get that, you can understand where he’s coming from, but you don’t know what that has to do with this.

You watch the flush rise in his cheeks, creep down his throat.

“I guess I just wanted to prove a point? So I just sort of messed around with your lock until I figured out how to open it because I guess the little thingies in it get pushed by the key and I can push them with the air too and _oh god that sounds so creepy I’m sorry-”_ and yeah, that _is_ kind of creepy, you probably could have done without knowing that he taught himself to be a supernatural lock pick for the sake of fucking with you- “but I guess I was kind of drawn to it because nothing’s hard anymore?? It was sort of the first interesting thing to happen in a while??”

You’re not sure how to feel about that.

“And I was just going to mess with you a little and do a few shows and go home but then you did stuff back and it was really funny?? So I used it and people loved it and they asked me to do a thing there a couple times a week and that was pretty cool and you seemed kind of lame but cool somehow but I didn’t think that _meant anything-_ ”

He’s rambling. That itch of recognition is starting to make you nuts. You’re just on the edge of knowing what you’re missing and you feel like it’s something that should be obvious and you’re probably going to feel really stupid when you figured it out.

“-but then you got me really good and it actually helped me a lot but I was kind of mad anyway but you didn’t get mad when I messed up all your shit-” and you remember that, the feather and Vaseline incident, and you refrain from pointing out that you didn’t _get mad_ because he messed himself up with it, too- “and you kept being cool about things and I wanted you to stop being cool about things so I could just think you were lame and douchey again but then you _didn’t-_ ”

He looks genuinely frustrated and you can feel your eyebrows rising because you think he’s about to imply something hilariously stupid.

“-you just kept being cool about everything except you were all weird and twitchy in Las Vegas and that should’ve been lame but it was _just really cute somehow??_ Oh god that sounds so lame, I’m so lame and I just keep getting lamer ‘cause I kind of realized then that Rose was probably right and I should’ve just left or stepped off or something but you’re kind of sexy when you get past the douchebag fratboy anime weirdo shit and you didn’t even do anything but look at my butt sometimes and I kind of started everything and that’s actually really embarrassing??”

He’s red to the tips of his ears and he’s fidgeting and sort of shrugging restlessly he’s trying to dismiss something and _yeah_ , you’re pretty sure you know where this is going.

“And then I was kind of like maybe you wouldn’t notice but you did, _duh_ , and you were really good about it and I could tell you didn’t want to scare me and _you wouldn’t even let me scare myself??_ I don’t know if that makes any sense but I was kind of freaked out but I thought maybe it would be fine if we just messed around a bit because that wasn’t really what Rose said would happen so I’d still be right and I thought maybe you’d do something weird because Dave always said you were into weird shit and your apartment is full of weird shit but you didn’t, you were just really, really good about everything and I was being such a dick but you were just being _so fucking nice about it!!!_ ”

You just look at him because as much as you expected it, is he _honestly blaming you for this?_

He looks a little ashamed at that, but more frustrated. “I mean, being gay is fine or whatever, but I don’t even like guys,” he tells you belligerently.

Yeah, well, you operated under the same impression right up until _he_ jumped _you_.

“I don’t!” and now he’s insisting and you’re being kind of mean but you _weren’t the one who begged for a cock in the ass, were you?_

Between the overflow of brattiness and embarrassment, you didn’t think it was possible for him to be any redder than he is. It is, apparently.

He clams up for a second and you think he’s finally stopped but he hasn’t because he just asks why you _have to be so good about everything?????_ and he looks really mad when he says it and it finally clicks.

You suddenly get it and _don’t laugh, this isn’t funny!!!!!!_

But it _is_ funny because you’ve spent this entire time assuming that he was going to get bored with you and just go back to screwing girls in a slightly less vanilla way or that he’d suddenly comprehend that you’re twice his age and that you’re just going to get older and leave to find greener kink pastures or that he was just never going to like you as much as you like him because you’ve become so attached to him that it terrifies you and you can’t imagine what could compel him to feel the same but you were wrong, you were _completely wrong_.

He’s _smitten_ with you.

This is not a crush, not lust, not even infatuation. This is the constant shifting and fidgeting of true awkwardness, this is him acting like he’s walking across a chasm on piano wire, this is the nervous belligerence of real fear because he’s _absolutely smitten_ with you and he has been this whole time, getting exponentially clinger and brattier because he wants to get you out of his system but he can’t and because he’s afraid you don’t feel the same, afraid that walking away is an option for you like it isn’t for him and he hates you for it just as much as you hate him for the knots he’s worked you into and this _is_ funny, this is _hilarious_ , this is irony _,_ _true irony_ , the gold standard of situational irony: you’ve both been steering the same self-destructive trainwreck full-tilt down the same hill, each thinking the other was already waiting impatiently at the bottom.

He looks upset and kind of hurt but you can’t help it, you’re relieved and terrified and overwhelmed and _terrified_ because you think you know what this means and something suddenly occurs to you, _holy shit_.

He’s eying you defensively. “What?”

You ask him what would happen if his fans found out you were in some sort of relationship together, _that’s pretty weird, right?_

He looks horrified for a second and then _wait, um- did you?? uhh, I’m- some sort of relationship???_ and he looks torn between anxious suspicion and cautious hope and you guess you did say that, actually.

You’re not even close to being okay with all of this bullshit and you still think he’ll be the death of you, but _yeah, you guess you did_.


	23. Chapter 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nobody writes morning sex. More people should write morning sex. Have some morning sex.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was another monstrously-difficult-to-write chapter, for some reason. Part of that may be because the first part kept making me sleepy as I wrote it. (Hopefully it comes across- it's not the easiest set of sensations to recreate.) 
> 
> Possibly kind of shitty chapter, sorry, and short. It'll get better.

You wake to warmth and wetness against your mouth.

Well, _wake_ is a strong word.

You haven’t really decided if you’re willing to be awake yet. It’s more of a reluctant stirring and an incomplete rumble of a groan and the first sluggish pieces of a thought.

You grunt a little as he settles his weight against you, twitch as something traces light patterns on your palm, murmur and shift with lethargic interest as he pressed that hand into something firm with a distantly appealing amount of give, and hiss as he rocks against an erection you’d barely realized was yours.

You feel his giggle more than you hear it, feel it vibrate through your lips and cheeks, jarringly high and fast compared to the slow thrum of your heartbeat.

And you want to wake up, you’re interested, you want to reciprocate- but you’re _so tired_ , so fucking tired, how fucking early is it, you feel like you’ve barely slept.

At first nothing changes when you crack an eye open.

 And then you get the barest sense of grey, an undulating monochromatic trickery that your eyes can’t adjust to that can only mean one thing:

It’s too fucking early for this.

You try you damnedest to tell him that, but all you manage is a disapproving groan and he just giggles again and presses his mouth against your palm and when did he even move that, you thought that was somewhere else or maybe that was the other hand who even knows.

You’re too tired to recognize that you’re too tired to keep track of all of your parts. You just know that pieces of you keep flaring into bright, sensitive existence as he touches them, lightning-bright flashes of sensation along your hands and throat and chest and cock, _especially_ your cock and even if you were awake enough to make comparisons, you don’t know what you’d compare this to.

You just _feel_ , as though your sense of touch has taken over all of your other senses. You feel the sudden breathiness of his laugh, feel the scent of him in the heat of his body, feel the expression he makes as he moans against your throat, feel his cold fingers and the rock of his hips and the slide of his cock against yours in a way that excludes all else, a bright spot of consistent stimulation that could make you forget you have a head and a face and a mouth until he kisses it, jostles his nose against your cheek clumsily and sends eddies of laughter threading through your eyelashes.

And it feels _good_.

You almost regret the slow trickle of awareness percolating through your body, because your fingertips are tingling and your knees are stiff and your mouth is dry and it’s taking away from the brightness of that sensation but then you open your eyes again and you don’t regret it, you don’t regret waking up at all because you can see him, rendered in the half-invisible shades of pre-dawn, colourless and misty and gorgeous, and he could be an illusion if it weren’t for the slow rock of his hips against yours.

And you have hands again so you smooth them up his thighs and he’s sitting up and looking down at you and you hear his smile when he murmurs _good morning_ and you’re still too tired for words so he’ll have to be content with the lazy little squeeze you give his knees.

And he keeps rocking against you, one hand wrapped loosely around the both of you and it’s teasingly light and you’re brutally hard, so you start to roll your hips with his, a little slow and a little sloppy because the movement awakens a stiffness in your lower back and the ache of stretching feels good but you’re out of sync and he laughs at you and kisses your jaw and you wrinkle your nose at him and he calls you cute and you’re awake enough to find that weird, you don’t think anyone’s ever called you cute.

He squeezes and you’re suddenly not sure what you were thinking about it, if you were thinking at all.

It’s dark and lazy and you wish you could just do this forever but there’s a burning knot of tension building below your guts and you start to pull and push at him, not sure what you want but sure that it’s something he can give you and he’s getting a bit breathless and he stops, why did he stop?

You can see movement and it takes you a moment to recognize that he’s chewing his lip and another to remember that this probably means he wants something.

Your best approximation of a question is a pointed mumble.

He murmurs something back and _oh_.

You know he’s never done this himself and that he’s mimicking what you did for him and at least part of you knows that you’re using your fatigue as an excuse to make what might be a poor decision, but you still snicker a little when he fumbles with the lube bottle and _oh_.

_Oh._

Oh, _okay_.

An unexpected counterpart to an unexpected proposal.

 You guess it’s better that he doesn’t try to finger himself given that he only has the barest clue how to, but you’re still a little surprised when he spreads the lube over your fingers and presses them up against him instead.

You can’t say you’re complaining. You’re still drowsy and losing tracks of pieces of yourself and hyperfocusing on others, and pushing the first finger in is like being totally immersed in sudden heat. He contracts around you and you stop and mutter soothingly at him until you realize that he’s not used to the angle and that the lube is probably cold, it’s always cold, but by then he’s moving again and you risk a second finger because the lube is running down your hand onto your stomach and it _is_ cold, holy shit.

You can almost feel his groan, feel it running right through the bones of your hand.

And you suddenly remember you have a dick and another hand and that the lube you’re losing could be put to better use and you start multitasking but you’re not doing a very good job at it because you’re reduced to just sort of palming yourself and curling your fingers inside of him awkwardly so you stop and just focus on doing one thing at a time again and he laughs at you.

You feel his fingers- fucking _freezing, kid needs mittens or something_ \- brush your face and he tells you that he _kind of thinks he likes you like this_ and you can hear the breathlessness in his teasing and you’d roll your eyes if it didn’t seem like a truly astronomical amount of effort so instead you just push in a third finger and feel around a bit inside of him and flex your fingers against that hard lump of tissue and shut him up that way.

It suddenly occurs to you to be vaguely concerned that you’re experienced enough at this to literally be able to do it half-asleep.

But because you’re half-asleep, you promptly forget what you were concerned about and your hand is suddenly cold and _oh goddamn_.

You guess he got impatient and you itch with vague disapproval over his shoving himself down on your cock like this isn’t a relatively new thing for him but _holy shit_.

It feels _really fucking good_ and he’s doing _really well_ and you’re distantly confused by that for some reason and _jesus christ_ and _you remember_ , this position is really hard on the knees and thighs but he’s keeping a really, _really good_ pace, a good, steady pace and you look at him and he’s actually leaning back a bit and playing with himself and it’s _so tight, he’s so fucking tight_ and you can tell by his gasping that he’s shifted his position so that you’re pressing into his prostate but that should be _impossible_ , he’s not a fucking gymnast and he should be overbalanced and he should be falling backwards and _his knees aren’t touching the bed_.

You get it and you’re suddenly very awake.

You can’t decide if you’re really turned on or really freaked out by this. You suspect you might be both.

Regardless, your dick doesn’t seem to share your reservations. In fact, your dick is making it a little hard to maintain any reservations because _jesus fucking christ_ and then he moans and you can feel a little eddy of cool air travelling along your thighs and he rolls his hips up without any leverage and you kind of want to reproach him for doing impossible things because _you_ were supposed to ruin _him_ for all others, _not the other way around_.

The instant that thought occurs to you, you give the fuck up and just deal with it because _no_ , you’re not making the flying thing into an ego problem, that’s stupid.

He stops moving and his knees thump back down on the bed and he scrapes his fingernails down your chest and you _hmm_ appreciatively but you suspect that it wasn’t meant to be sexy. One look at his face confirms that.

“Is this going to be an issue?” and you get that he’s trying to sound firm but he just sounds sulky and you snort because _no, it doesn’t have to be an issue_.

Only then does it occur to you that this could be a _very_ interesting experience.

This is somehow less weird than a lot of the other shit you’re into, anyway.

==>

The second time John wakes you up, you’re no more willing to be awake.

You don’t even remember falling back asleep.

John is quick to inform you that you passed right the fuck out immediately after orgasming. He doesn’t sound impressed. You’re not surprised.

You’re _still_ fucking tired.

You get up anyway. You complete the prerequisite set of morning duties- piss, brush, wash, dress, shades- and John gives you an appreciative eyeballing and a couple of hopeful gropes and you laugh in his face because _nope_ , you’re still not twenty, no matter how badly he wants you to be.

You run into Jade and Dave in the kitchen. Breakfast is strangely awkward.

You’re tired enough that you don’t realize why until after.

==>

Sometimes you forget how young most of the occupants of this house are. Jade is alarmingly powerful and, as it turns out, very intelligent. Dave just _seems_ so old sometimes. Rose has a very adult presence. John…

John has a very adult boldness when it comes his very teenager-on-prom-night sex drive. Especially with you. Actually, you suspect it might _just_ be with you, which is flattering, but kind of exasperating.

They’re all kids. They may be adults, but they’re still kids.

Rose likes spending time with you. You like spending time with Rose.

John likes spending time with you. If you didn’t like spending time with John, you wouldn’t be in this fucking mess in the first place.

They are both somewhat opposed to sharing their time with you, apparently.

It is simultaneously hilarious and infuriating because it means that the relatively adult activities that you typically engage in with each respectively have dissolved completely into something a hell of a lot closer to babysitting.

Your attempts to mediate their steadily escalating exchange of witty barbs, noisy rebuttals and failed whoopee cushion placements isn’t working. In fact, you seem to be making it worse.

You’ve never been much of a babysitter.

==>

By noon you have an entourage and the beginnings of a migraine.

John pranked Rose with his weird powers, who responded by roping in Jade, who dragged along Dave, who responded to John’s pleading looks by dragging Roxy into the mess as well.

You wish this meant that the situation had escalated to the point that you could just quietly fuck off and nurse your aching skull, but the two main instigators of the thing are still more fixated on you than each other.

By two, you’ve dragged your following through literally every room in this house.

You’ve broken statues and statuettes, toppled a bookcase, aided in the rediscovery of a long-forgotten wine stash- ogm ur my fuvkin hero\- behind said bookcase, facilitated Jade’s cross-pollination project via a very disgruntled John- _who’s the pranking master now?????_ \- accidentally derailed the Rose versus John conflict into a spat between super-siblings, broken a trellis and a half dozen plant pots during said spat between super-siblings, and discovered that Dave and Roxy get along ridiculously well.

The last is because, at this point, you’ve given up.

You’ve tried reasoning- they’re not so good at listening.

You’ve tried strifing- John reverts to _ceiling mode_ , you would never hit Rose, you wouldn’t _dare_ hit Jade, Roxy can parry a katana with a martini glass, somehow.

You weren’t even trying to hit her.

Dave looked at you and twitched a hand towards his strife specibus and then she just fucking _appeared_.

You know that should’ve been your first clue, but you were too busy grinding steel against glass and being generally baffled at her giggling and deciding to lead everyone outside to wreck up the lawn and not the upholstery.

You simply do not give a fuck about the state of the Lalonde family’s interior design, but you don’t trust the look in Roxy’s eyes. You’d say it’s the look of someone who’s planning to bill you for damages, but she knows full well that you can pay whatever she asks.

You suspect she does not, in fact, plan to bill you for damages. You’re not sure what the alternative is. This unsettles you.

So you lead your posse into the yard and just give the fuck up. It’s warmer than it should be for this time of year. Tolerably warm- at least for you. And _outside_ does not echo and amplify noise in like _inside_ does.

There’s also a forest you may be able to escape into at some point when you don’t have two- sometimes three- twenty-year-olds chasing each other around you like feuding kindergarteners. You guess you can deal with this.

In the pleasant chill, you watch Dave offer Roxy his hoodie and clue in.

You’ve been thinking about her as Rose’s mother. You suppose she’s Dave’s mother, too.

Your thought process veers dangerously off-course at that- Dave’s your _bro, your little man_ \- but you’ve already had the thought, it’s done, it’s happened.

Suddenly, his mumbled jibes about her drinking seem less like mistimed teasing and more like genuine concern.

You watch her throw a sweater-clad arm around him- _he’s shivering, what a chivalric little asshole, where did you go wrong_ \- with a big sloppy smile and he makes a face but he doesn’t move away and you don’t know how to feel.

You never know how to feel anymore. This place has made everything infinitely more complicated and you’re risking backsliding into mild panic and _jesus fucking christ_ , that actually hurt.

You can’t see for a second. This may be because you have your hand on your face.

And Dave is mumbling loudly, something about _nice job jharl, elbows and strider faces two for two you got it, you climbed this whole mountain_ and Jade is apologizing and pulling at your arm with chilly fingers because _we need to make sure it’s not broken!!!!_ but of course it’s not broken, you’ve _been hit harder than that before, kid_.

If it was, it’d still be your own damn fault for letting it happen. _Sloppy_.

Well, you’re not bleeding and you’ve stopped the competition over your attention, so that’s something. Rose looks both amused and contrite. John’s just giggling.

“Dude, why do I even like you?”

> Harsh, man.

_And?_

You meant to say it and you don’t regret it. It shuts John up fast enough, anyway. He pouts at you. You remember that he’s not really sure why you like him, either, and _okay_ , maybe you do feel a little bad.

But not bad enough to apologize.

Besides, it doesn’t keep his mouth shut for long.

He gets as far as _I didn’t even do anything, jeez!!!_ before Dave pipes up.

You hear _no come on John you gotta admit_ and _you and Jade's grandpadad_ and _that one English guy_ before John starts talking very loudly and drowns him out in turn.

The volume level is rising and John looks flustered and Jade looks mischievous and “-I really don’t see why this is important!!!” and Rose, _Rose_.

“John, you’re sleeping with my father. Your protests are irrelevant.”

 _Rose_.

Rose looks like she’s never regretted anything less.

You’re proud.

> Christ, is she ever your kid.

Dave starts laughing. You think he might wet himself.

> It is Low-Blow Day today or something? Did I miss the memo?

John’s fucking _scarlet_.

> Not to be confused with Blow Day, which is infinitely more pleasant. Usually.

Jade is sitting on the grass, giggling.

Roxy is waet dave u mena jake rite? and who the fuck is Jake?

You can almost feel the atmosphere turn awkward.

Roxy can’t, evidently. You blame the gin.

But Jake is apparently jadey’s grampops cept yougn and hott and you’re not really sure what that has to do with anything. Shit, you’re not even sure what _anything_ is anymore. What the fuck are you even talking about?

You’re talking about the alfalfa kids which Dave corrects to the _alpha session, the second set of players, like when you switch fighters in tekken_ which is _really not important at all!!!!!!!_ and okay, yeah, you talked about this before.

You remember Rose’s drawings. She nods before you ask.

Roxy looks pensive.

This concerns you.

wate wate so i geuss other dork- dirk- nop dork lol- hda a boner 4 johns ectodad amirite??? lol waaat tiems 2 genertshun- genrashun- w/e its a tiems 2 famlily combob

What?

> What.

John looks like he wants to die.


	24. Chapter 24

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally, a chapter! I'm so sorry for the delay, and I'm sorry this is so short. I love you guys!

You’d like to think you’ve witnessed enough awkward moments in your somewhat colourful life to say with confidence that no moment is truly unsalvageable, but you suspect you’ve just been proven wrong.

This isn’t a moment defined by a mixture of confusion and reluctance on the part of its participants.

You think this is might be a moment in which literally no one has any idea what to say.

Even Roxy, who you’d thought you could count on to be steadfastly oblivious to tension, is just looking at John expectantly.

Rose, the girl who should never be surprised, is staring at her mother.

Jade looks stunned. Dave tries to say something, but his mumbling never reaches the point of actual words. He shrugs helplessly at you.

And John is quietly expiring under your stare.

The breeze has chilled to a point that might be natural. You’re not sure. But Dave is shivering, so you guess it doesn’t matter.

You ask if you _should, uh, move this to the dining room?_ and you can almost hear the silence snap.

Rose makes a sound, some kind of hysteria-pitched high C that makes you wonder if her vocal cords are about to split like a rubber band.

You think it was meant to be a giggle.

==>

Everyone is staring at you.

Except for John.

John doesn’t seem to know where the fuck to look.

You almost want to marvel at the liquidity of this tension; it just seems to swallow every word you say, reforming over it with the glassy resilience of impenetrable awkwardness.

So you try again.

“Jake,” you prompt.

As expected, there’s a universal ripple of wincing. You don’t care. That doesn’t help because everyone here knows something you don’t and a couple of them are shooting you looks that skim the edge of pity a little too closely for your liking and _you’re getting very impatient_.

The words come out with a lightness you recognize as meaning that you’re starting to get legitimately angry, but they have an interesting effect.

Rose’s face does a sudden convulsion, crumpling grating sympathy into confusion and then realization.

And then she laughs and it’s a real noise and the entire room looks at her like she just made a joke in the middle of a eulogy.

And she laughs harder, hiding her mouth behind her hand and shaking and there’s a little bit of wonderment in there, a bit of delicate balance and you recognize that she’s laughing at herself and you're a little unsettled by how easily you can access that, given so little information.

Because you suspect it’s the same when she looks at you.

As discomfiting as the prospect is, it eases the knot of irritation settled below your lungs because you’re not alone, suddenly, it’s not just you and a room full of mourners, you at a funeral for someone you didn’t even know.

Dave is watching Rose and his eyebrow is furrowing and her head turns and he does a little jerk and you look at him and realize that he’s realized whatever it is that Rose did and you think Dave might be laughing, now, too.

You’re starting to backslide into annoyance.

Laughing is better than tense melancholy silence, but you still don’t know _what the fuck is going on or why you’re supposed to give a shit about this Jake kid_.

And then the rest of the room twitches and furrows and starts giggling and John slaps his hand to his forehead and it’s a really stupid, overwrought gesture and you’re pretty sure Roxy’s just laughing because everyone else is and you _still don’t know what the fuck is going on._

John just sighs and tells you that _alternate universe you_ and _alternate universe Jade’s grandpa_ had a thing. Like, a bromantic thing. Perpetrated largely by a very infatuated _alternate universe you_.

Okay. You can accept that. And this guy is Jade and John’s ectobiowhatever baby daddy. Other than the obvious- the obvious being weird implications re: you and John boning- _so?_

Rose starts saying something but is overcome with another attack of the giggles. You frown at her and wait.

Jade cuts in because it’s _kind of sad!!!_

You stare at her uncomprehendingly.

But it’s just that _now you’re all alone!!!_

What?

No.

No, dude.

As far as you’re concerned, you have always been alone. And you have Dave. And, well, John, you guess. Is this a loss thing? You didn’t _lose_ anything.

You’re so fucking confused right now.

Rose just giggles harder. You think you see tears.

Jade is apparently unconvinced because _but they were happy and that stopped when everything reset and everybody else got what they wanted but you!!!!_ and the giggling stops and the room goes a bit quiet again.

And you don’t know what she means, so you ask.

She tells you that _alternate universe you_ and pals lived in exceptionally shitty circumstances involving an unacceptable amount of alien meddling and fuckery.

She says everybody else got to be what they dreamed of being.

She tells you that her grandfather was a famous adventurer and inventor. She tells you that John’s grandmother was the heir to the Betty Crocker fortune before a bunch of shit went down with a meteor and then pursued her passion for practical jokes until some more shit went down with another meteor.

She tells you that Rose’s mom is a crazy loaded- which you’d _kind of noticed, thanks_ \- on account of being a computer genius, which you hadn’t known. Roxy shoots you a smile that would probably be conspiratorial if she wasn’t very slightly cross-eyed.

And you, you turned out to be-

Well, you.

You’re a bit offended by the implication.

You’re kind of curious what you were doing in the alternate universe; what big dreams you were apparently cooking up.

She looks kind of thoughtful.

She tells you that she is given to understand that you lived alone in the middle of an ocean until the game. She says she thinks you still made smuppets. She says you built robots to fight with, robots to rap with- _or maybe it was both???-_ and, oh, that _you made an A.I.!!! Dirk was really good with robots!!_

You almost manage some comment about how you clearly know what you like in any shithole universe they put you in, but you kind of stalled over the A.I. part.

She looks kind of hesitant when you ask.

So do John and Dave, actually.

Rose- _thank god for Rose, thank fucking god_ \- almost manages to say something.

But then Roxy says i dunno waht the ishue is teheres alweys D# and she says _D-Numbers_ and you automatically correct her, tell her _it’s D-Sharp, like the note._

And then you turn to stare at her but your vision is suddenly orange.

> Sorry, dude.

You can hear her chair scraping. The rest of the room seems a little too quiet.

> She caught me when I loaded the walkthrough to your phone.

Something’s making a strange tapping against the floor- _oh, that’s right, she wears her heels inside_.

> I couldn’t really say anything without her knowing.

And then the orange is gone, she’s pulling the shades from your face and putting them on her own and going wall helello thar and you still hear it in that font and you feel strangely empty without D# there to go pink for a second and she’s giggling and you’re just kind of staring, you just stare as she wanders out of the room with your glasses and your remote proxy and an empty martini glass.

And the room is fucking _silent_.

Everyone is staring at you again.

Dave asks you something.

You have no idea what the fuck it was, just that it’s a question because it sounded like one.

And he says _bro did you make an a.i. tell me you didnt really make an a.i._ but you did. You made an A.I.

You can understand why that might unnerve people, but you suspect that isn’t why these people in particular are unnerved.

And John asks you why you _would need an auto-responder??? you don’t talk to anyone!!!_ and now you’re kind of offended, actually, do you look like the kind of irresponsible asshole who would bring a mind into existence to answer your emails or something?

And Rose is just giggling again. Or still, maybe. You’re not even sure if she ever stopped, but she’s not giggling too hard to say anything, because you can see Jade fidgeting and Dave and John gearing up for something but her voice slides in, smooth and clear as music, made just a little sweeter with mirth.

“Did you make him from yourself, Bro?”

You confirm this to be true _._

“And how old are you, Bro?”

You decide that it’s not a moment to make jokes about not asking a lady her age and just tell her.

She smiles, leaning a little on one hand. “And do you think your neurological processes are equivalent to those of a thirteen-year-old boy, Bro?”

You feel your expression answer that before you can. She titters.

“Bro isn’t Dirk. D#-” there’s a question in her voice and you nod “-isn’t Dirk, either. Questions?”

Jade looks thoughtful again. Dave is just kind of squirmy.

John is making a face.

You raise an eyebrow at him.

“Does it live in your glasses?”

No, _he_ doesn’t live in your glasses.

You try to explain remote access, but he interrupts you.

“But can he see _through your glasses???_ ”

You did install a remotely accessible camera in them, yes. You’re not sure why that’s bothering him.

Apparently it bothers him because _he watches us when we uh??? um???  when we do things????????_

Oh.

_Oh._

You guess so, actually.

You hadn’t really considered that.

Yes, those are definitely tears of laughter on Rose’s face.

==>

 


	25. Chapter 25

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bro gets antsy in a place that isn't home. Well, more so than usual.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry for the insanely long wait; I've been mad busy with school. (Also screwing around irresponsibly on Tumblr, but what the fuck else is new.) We're drawing in on the last furlong, kids!

You’re starting to think about going home.

You came here with a very vague idea of a goal and a sense of impending doom and- all things considered- you think you got what you came for. Just without the doom. This is probably the best way this magnificent shitshow could’ve played out for you, and you recognize that.

But the momentum of your fear and desperation is stalling- it’s all details. You’re into the details portion, and you’re starting to get bored. You’ve got the title, the body of the thing, just not the footnotes.

And now you’re thinking about going home.

The fact that you’re a stranger in a close-knit household becomes more obvious with every hour. Sure, they’re friendly with you.

They’re too fucking friendly with you.

Once it started, the posse-forming behaviour never stopped. You get it, in a way.

You’re new. You’re interesting. You’re the best and brightest method of shutting up John Egbert the Lalonde residence has to offer.

A single witty reference, a pointed look in your direction, and he’s back to paperback trash protagonist scarlet, because you being here is definitive evidence of the hole he dug himself into.

You don’t blame them for taking advantage of that to make fun of him. You would too, were the circumstances different.

As it is, he has a pretty good method of shutting you up.

And you think you’d like to get that home, too.

As down as you are for kinky semi-exhibitionistic shit, you want to get home to your own bed. Your own lube. Your own toys.

The metric fuckload of orders you’ve fallen behind on again.

D# was quick to inform you that he’s kept up appearances, but he lacks the necessary brobility to get anything done.

 You also miss not having to worry about anybody but John trying to steal your glasses.

It seems like each time you managed to retrieve them, Roxy’s just waiting for you to slip up again. And she’s fast. Surprisingly fast.

And D# has been weirdly reticent about his conversations with her.

You have your suspicions about that.

==>

John seems torn by your proposal.

“Go back? Already?”

Already, he asks.

You feel like you’ve spent half your life here.

Your time here has been a seizure-inducingly compressed montage of insanity and bad decisions and high-speed coping, and you think you’ve had enough.

At least for now.

Your only regret is that you can’t take both Rose and John back with you; it has to be one or the other.

But you’ve got Rose’s pesterchum handle, and she’s got your website details, an amused detachment about the contents of said website, and a few intriguing- if unsurprisingly tentacle-related- suggestions you don’t think you’ll be too quick to discount.

Ordinarily you’d be hesitant to drag anyone into your terribly pragmatic pit of lucrative depravity, but she’s so completely your daughter that you find it difficult to believe she wasn’t already there with you.

And there’s something warm and fuzzy about the prospect of having a family business, admittedly. Some families make crafts or cupcakes together- you might just make highly lovable knit Butthulhu, eldtrich terror of the bedroom, and you don’t even fucking regret the possibility.

It would give you a use for some of your shittier vibrators, too. Set those suckers on a high enough level and that whine is borderline unholy. Hell, you think you could adjust them to do that constantly.

People that are into even weirder shit than you always seem to have all the spare cash.

And John is still talking. _Oops._

He’s tapping his foot. His arms are crossed. You just look at him. He doesn’t even ask if you were listening. He just rolls his eyes. He knows.

You laugh because he knows and that’s great. It still freaks the fuck out of you, but it’s great.

==>

Conversations over dinner always devolve into details. You’ve gotten used to it.

Most of the time you end up tuning it out, despite being the only person who isn’t privy to said details.

You only tune back in when your ear catches on something strange- usually Freudian, and it’s usually John’s fault when that happens- or if someone starts laughing and you don’t quite get the joke.

Tonight, it’s the latter.

You look up from your plate and ask “What?” before you can stop yourself and Rose is scowling unattractively and Roxy is giggling in a way that suggests it’s her fault and she knows it.

ive gon rouge- rogue* w/ rosie’s knitin lmao

You raise an eyebrow.

u mite say its voud- void* o substense- sebstanse*- stuffses* w/e

You’ve missed the punchline, clearly. Dave and Rose are groaning. Jade and John are giggling.

It must have been a shitty punchline.

“Mother’s Sburb title was _Rogue of Void_. She appreciates the conversational opportunities this provides, apparently.”

Ah, Rose, your eternal saviour.

But god _damn, those are shitty jokes._

Rose grimaces sympathetically at you.

Roxy babbles something so incomprehensible that even D#, your steadfast translator and sassbot, just graces you with ???????.

You presume it’s just the two of you who’re having trouble, because everyone else groans. Well, except Jade.

But Jade seems to be giggling or at least in a good mood a large percentage of the time- I’d say about 87%, Bro, if we’re keeping it in whole numbers. Depends on John, mostly\- so you don’t really think she counts.

Dave helpfully clues you in when you catch up with his rambling about _no more knight jokes man come on its been years this shit is older than the pyramids and more tired than the slaves who built those suckers and no time jokes please I am shit outta fucking time for time jokes_ and Jade bursts in even more pronounced giggles and Dave just mumbles _aw goddamn it_ and you assume that means he’s the Knight of Time and he says _yeah_ and Jade helpfully informs you that she’s _the witch of space!!!!!!_

And it seems that Rose is _the Seer of Light, as may have been expected_ and John is _the Heir of Breath, inheritor of the greatest capacity for the oral passage of wind the world should ever see_ and the Heir in question takes a moment too long to catch on to her meaning and the ensuing squabble is almost worth the puns.

You mull it over.

Do you want to know?

John is throwing clumps of mashed potato at Rose and they’re leaving almost artistically spattered lines of gravy across the wood and Jade looks like she’s waiting for you to ask and Dave is mumbling at high speeds and shaking his head at her and you’re not sure you want to know.

You have to ask, of course. How could you not?

But you’re not sure you want to know.

Jade squeals with laughter before the words even make it far enough past your lips to linger, and John pauses mid-semi-liquid-tuber-slinging to snicker at you and drops potato all over himself.

It disturbs you that this tragic misplacement of root vegetables and reduced essence of cow isn’t enough to derail him for longer than a single _shit!!!!_ and a short giggle from his sister before he turns back to you with that wicked little shit-eating grin, still trying to sponge gravy off of his shirt with a dry napkin.

You ask again because you have to, not because you want to.

At this point, you’re pretty damn certain you don’t want to know.

Rose tells you before John can do more than light up with ill intentions.

And you-

_What?_

> Oh my god.

No, actually.

> Lady Londe-on-the-Rox told me some of the details, but I thought she was joking about that.

They have to be fucking with you.

> Dude, I don’t think they are.

“Prince of Heart,” you repeat incredulously, and John starts giggling in the middle of shoving the napkin across a soiled pant leg and it shoots out from between his fingers and disappears under the table.

That is _literally the gayest thing you have ever heard_.

You may have a strong hankering for persons of a dudely persuasion, but you’re no less masculine for it, and all that sequence of words is giving you is a mental image of some flaming twink in a pair of puffy elastic-bottomed shorts. Probably some shade of pink that he’d correct you on, too. Salmon, maybe. Or Cabernet. Merlot.

Probably merlot.

Something with a pretentiously luxurious name tacked onto it, a size too small to cover the block letter signage underneath because the thing is still fucking _pink_.

You’re actually mildly offended.

Dave’s doing his best not to snicker at you and on some level you do appreciate that but you’re still going to beat his ass the second you get the chance.

John is flat-out laughing at you and _hell fucking yes he’s gonna get his ass beat, too_.

Rose stems her giggling behind a hand and helpfully informs you that the title may sound _rather flamboyant, admittedly_ , but _the meaning is quite the opposite to what you’re assuming, I assure you_.

She tells you that it’s translatable to _Destroyer of Souls; alternatively, Destroyer through Souls._

That is less infinitely uncool. You’re slightly appeased.

You still have no idea what that means.

She and Dave share a queasy glance and there’s a clicking to the left and a hand sneaking in, about to strike like a goddamn cobra and _aw hell no, does she really think you’re gonna fall for that again?_

Roxy whips her hand back before you can grab it and dissolves into what’s either slurred tittering or a string of especially incomprehensible words and you watch the wave of expensive gin sluice over the edge of her glass like a pungent juniper tsunami, taste and smell that miniature catastrophe as it descends in a glittering arc towards you and you feel every muscle along your spine hum with tension and you _move, you move without thinking, without restraint_.

You guess you shouldn’t be surprised that only Dave doesn’t look surprised. Even Rose looks a little startled. _Like someone who knows the principle of a thing but has never seen it,_ you guess.

 Dave just gives you a sarcastic little clap and you look dispassionately at the liquid dripping off of the edge of your seat and ignore Jade’s little noise of excitement and John’s weird, choked yowl because _yeah, okay, you guess you’re still a lot faster than Dave_.

Jade tells you that it’s because _dave cheats by using his time powers!!!_ and Dave starts to argue but _yeah you guess you get that, sorry, you try not to do that when you’re not strifing._

And Jade wants to know why and Roxy is why, because she’s just gaping at you and she’s poured the rest of her drink all over the floor and this has completely derailed the conversation you were having, you still want to talk about what the fuck being a destroyer of or through souls means but you don’t think you’re going to get to.

> I know a couple things. We can talk about it later, Bro.

Thank christ for you.

At least you can count on some piece of yourself to stay on fucking track.

==>

John’s still lingering.

You understand.

His family is here. Even if they tease him mercilessly, this is home.

Shit, even the deadlier Egbert visits often. Everything he has is here.

You tell him he doesn’t have to come back with you if he doesn’t want to.

He hits you.

You’re selfish enough to be glad.

==>

They don’t want you to go.

You understand that, too.

Rose knew, of course. Rose always knows and for some reason you’re okay with that, so you just shrug at her over Dave’s head as Jade tries to re-initiate the bone-crushing trainwreck of a group hug that was your first encounter and watch her disappear as Roxy grabs you into something closer to a wrestling hold than an embrace and attempts to drown you in her bosom.

Literally.

And you hear John giggling at you as Dave grunts uncomfortably between you and his girlfriend as she digs her fingers into your sides determinedly so neither of you can escape, and you feel the ache in your back begin to murmur as Roxy pulls your head and shoulders apart from the mess of human contact that cements the rest of you in place and you can feel her nails through your shirt and in your hair and her dress smells too sweet, like a little girl’s perfume and _you legitimately can’t breathe, okay, you’re going to die, you’re going to die here, Bro Strider, dead at forty-one, asphyxiated by the tits of a drunk woman because your arms were pinned to your sides by a very affectionate girl with dog ears_.

You hear Rose’s musical little laugh at the same that you rediscover air and suddenly you’re kind of cold, there’s so much space around you and you feel arms wrap around your shoulders and she’s on the tips of her toes so _fuck it_ , you guess you can be a little uncool for a second and you squat a bit so she can reach and _wrap your arms around her but are they supposed to go under or over, shit, how does this work_ and she laughs at you again and just holds you, still so small and soft and warm despite all the hard edges of her words and the coldness of her smiles and it’s fine because she knows what she’s doing even if you don’t and it’s fine, you know, you both know.

You’re not sure why it surprises you when she kisses you on the cheek.

Maybe because nobody’s ever done that before. Well, nobody sober. Nobody sincere.

If you forget to wipe the black lipstick from your cheek for longer than is strictly characteristic of you, John doesn’t mention it.

It’s fine.

He knows.

You both know.

Everyone else has piled out onto the lawn, a tumble of excitable girls in coke bottle glasses and shiny familiar buckteeth and intoxicated women that keep stumbling as their heels disappear into the grass but manage never to spill their drinks and awkward little brothers who still can’t help but smile a little when they shoot you bad imitations of stern brotherly nods, but she’s still standing in the door when you turn the key in the ignition.

The motor purrs into life like it isn’t the base component of what you’d call an only arguably automotive pile of shit and you suddenly realize why.

Because it’s not.

Because there’s nothing wrong with your car. It is a beautiful sequence of mechanisms, a chronically and ironically uncool machine in perfect working order.

You were never having trouble with your air conditioner.

You look at John.

He has the decency to look a little embarrassed. 


	26. Chapter 26

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The final installment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it. This is the end. The last curveball Joker Over Knave will ever throw at you.
> 
> I love you guys.
> 
> Thank you for sticking with me throughout this craziness.
> 
> I hope you enjoy it.

The drive home is surreal.

You’ve been fidgeting with the air conditioning since you left- at first, a little pointedly, with sidelong glances at John that you know he saw because you wanted him to see them- but now it’s just because you’re falling into a disconcerting lull.

Even with the air conditioning cranked down to something approaching invigoratingly balls-shriveling, the vents only produce a soft, constant hiss of air- enough to make the hair on your arms shiver away from the skin, but not enough to snap you out of the stillness you feel between each breath.

You keep thinking about the car rides you’ve taken with John.

You keep thinking about how it really hasn’t been that long since the two of you fell into this, about how you should really man up and discuss the long-term of the two of you and about what’s going to happen with his job and your job and travelling, and then you just keep thinking about car rides.

You tinker with the air conditioning and you think about the coldness of your drive to New York, about how it was cold in more than temperature.

You think about him rutting against you in a hotel room, and rolling over and having him slide effortlessly into the gaps of you, about how his fitting against you like a puzzle piece felt like a cruel promise because the perfection of it made you feel like everything else had to stop, like you should just disappear, like the world should end there in that perfect moment of self-loathing because there was no way what you’d find the morning after could improve upon that symmetry.

You think about relief.

You think about him sliding back into the car with you just so many hours ago, still fresh and vivid, still raw, and you think about symmetry and you think about relief.

You think about talking about it because you know he’s thinking about it, too, somehow, but then you think about how the stillness of the air is too heavy and impenetrable for the mush-mouthed dictations of a Texas shut-in like you.

You think about driving to Nevada, about watching him drive, about noticing that he drives with both hands on the wheel in proper clockwork positions like he’s still fresh out of fucking driving school, the star pupil of Prius-driving suburb babies. You think about examining his face out of the corner of your eye, about looking at his profile and noting the way he tucks his lower lip behind those stupid goddamn teeth when he concentrates, that it’s not just something that happens, that it’s something he subconsciously does.

You think about surreptitiously looking at the way his clothes fit him, about appreciating the curves and angles of him in the seat beside yours and you think about not having any expectations about ever touching them and you think about being completely fine with that.

You think about driving back over state lines towards Texas, about sudden heat that had nothing to do with the weather, about feeling the car pull over and looking up, about feeling the weight of him in your lap and his teeth as they scraped against the grain of stubble below your ear and the first ridge of his knuckles as they  were pressed into your scalp by the grip he had on your hair and you think about caving, about starting to slide your hands over the curve of his ass and then having them empty, about watching him buckle his seatbelt again like his fingers weren’t sticky from hair gel, like his lips hadn’t gone an abused-looking red from dragging against the roughness of your throat, like you didn’t want to dig your fingers into the promising flesh you could still feel filling your palms, soft but firm under worn fabric.

You think about barely getting the door closed before his body was pressing against yours again, about the desperate impatience with which he touched you, about the stewing brew of fervent desire and childish irritation in his sloppy kisses and clumsy gropes, and you think about confusion, of never quite knowing what that meant, of never quite knowing what he wanted from you or why.

You think about making bad decisions, about the way his eyebrows furrowed together when touched you, like he blamed you for how badly he wanted you, like he almost hated you for it, about riding him in a house full of people not because it was a good idea, but because you wanted one last go before you lost him forever.

You think about waking up to him grinding on you.

You think about how all of this started, about grinding on the couch, about tying him up, about the _sounds_ he made, about the way he pushed down on you too fast, way too goddamn reckless, about how you wanted to disapprove but it was _so fucking hot_ and not at all what you’d expected because he never gave you the chance to form any expectations, and you turn off the interstate and just go, drive until you can pull the fucking car over on some West Virginian back road, because the weird rubber band of tension you’ve been carrying just snapped and you must not be alone in that because he doesn’t even question it, he just stumbles his way over the gear stick and falls on you.

It’s clumsy and there isn’t enough space for both of you and he’s bending awkwardly to accommodate the steering wheel and his elbow knocks the horn and you spend too long fumbling for the lever before you can shift the seat back but then he’s there, flush against you, John Egbert, your John, hot mouth and cold hands, and you’re way too aware of how stupid this, of how fucking corny it is, of all things, but something in the both of you just synchronized and resonated and you can taste your own relief in the air on his tongue.

It’s somehow both frantic and lazy, you fumbling with your seatbelt and him arching away to let you, only to press back in, closer, more insistent, as the latch releases and the fabric pulls the buckle from your fingers with a _shh_ ing whine. Him squirming to fit into with within the narrowness of the seat and you shifting your backrest down, shifting sideways, pulling one leg between yours, one to the side; moments apart between moments of such desperate, crushing closeness that you’d swear you’re trying to absorb each other.

And you stay like that, only half-comfortable as you grind sloppily through your clothes and fuse your mouths together in some wet and needful act you’d be ashamed to call kissing, barely breathing, just a couple of grown-ass adults making out like couple of teenagers out past curfew, like there’s somebody to ground you, like you couldn’t just do this all fucking day if you liked, and you don’t even fucking _care_.

==>

You wake up in your car on a back road in West Virgina.

Your back and neck inform you that sleeping twisted together with another person in a seat patently intended for one person- _singular_ \- was a very poor decision and that you should re-evaluate your life choices.

You just consider yourself lucky you didn’t wake up to knocking on your window.

==>

You forgo staying at a motel in Tennessee in favour of pulling over on a back road in Arkansas.

Your spine begs you to re-evaluate your decision-making skills and threatens intervention.

==>

You make the acquaintance of one of your customers in a truck stop off of the I-30 W.

You find his feedback helpful and informative.

You don’t think John likes him very much.

==>

It takes you three days to get home.

When you open the door to your apartment, the fervid energy of your road trip doesn’t follow you past the threshold.

You’re suddenly not only sore, dehydrated, and suffering from rather troubling indigestion, you’re also _fucking exhausted_ in a way particular to only insomniacs and people who have travelled long distances.

That is to say, you’re exhausted, but you can’t sleep.

John is luckier.

You kind of hate him for it.

You consider waking him out of spite, but opt for the kinder option of listening to the slow rhythm of his breathing and staring at the ceiling, instead.

You are the pinnacle of generosity. You hope he appreciates this.

You will make damn sure he appreciates this.

After he wakes up, though.

Because you’re generous like that.

==>

You haven’t even drifted.

> You okay, Bro?

You haven’t even drifted.

> You should probably drink some water. The insomnia might be a dehydration thing.

Yeah. Yeah, you can probably do that.

Your knees scream as you stand.

> You should probably eat a fruit or something, too, dude. Man cannot live on fry oil alone.

You’d contest that if your bowels weren’t backed up to somewhere near your liver.

> Some caffeine will clear that out soon enough. Stimulation of the colon and all that. Water first, though, dude.

 You drink water until D# tells you to stop, which somewhere between uncomfortably overfull and full-blown nausea. You sip the coffee like a fucking princess because you kind of feel like you don’t really want to swallow anything ever again.

You eye the orange antagonistically.

==>

You take the best and worst dump of your life and feel strangely like you will never accomplish anything as significant ever again.

John is still sleeping.

==>

You make peace with the fucking orange.

And by peace you mean you gut it and sloppily devour its organs like a fucking gentleman.

John is still sleeping.

==>

You’ve got a good caffeine buzz going on. You’re not going to be sleeping at any point in the near future.

You question how long John can fucking sleep and if you should maybe wake him.

> It’s only been two hours, Bro.

No, it’s been a fucking eternity.

> Let him sleep.

You’re bored.  You can’t fill any more orders. You’re already going to have trouble fitting all these fucking boxes in your car. The post office is already closed, anyway.

> That’s fine. Better than fine, man. Let him sleep. We can have some quality time together.

You’re not even going to touch how fucking weird that is.

Besides, despite a pattern of deviation, you’re still largely the same person. Your conversations frequently spiral into I know. Do you know why I know? Because I’m you, Bro territory and that shit gets old fast. What could you possibly have to talk about?

> Heart.

You pause mid-pace to make a weird expression at your own eyewear.

> The aspect, you colossal douchehorn.

It takes you a moment to catch pace with him, but when you do, you waver.

You’re not entirely certain how you feel about the whole soul thing in the first place.

You’re not a religious man. You’re not even a spiritual one.

You can only really get behind soul if that shit is musical.

> Shut the fuck up for a second, dude.

D# sends you a link.

It’s of a crystal.

 _Oh hell no_.

He may be perma-baked, but you are going to commit ritual suicide, _goddamn fucking seppuku,_ if any aspect of you is getting into fucking crystal ball spirituality, hell fucking _no_.

> Jesus christ, calm your tits, man. Do you know what that is?

It’s a fucking crystal.

A clear one. The kind that grows into faceted shapes with tapered ends, presumably, seeing as that is what this fucking one is.

You’re not a fucking geologist. Gemologist? Shitty crystalogical specialist, who the fuck cares.

> It’s a piece of quartz, dunkass.

Okay.

And?

> Quartz is a naturally occurring piezoelectric material. It holds an electric charge, the strength of which corresponds to applied stress. They’re used in watches and shit.

That’s cool, you guess.

Actually that’s really fucking cool, who are you kidding, but you have no idea what the fuck that has to do with anything.

> You create electricity, you got a vibration. You got a vibration, congrats, you’re producing a frequency.  
> A crystal oscillator, the mechanism in which a piece of piezoelectric material is used, is designed to oscillate over a very specific range of frequencies, depending on what it’s a component of.

Still incredibly fucking cool, still _incredibly fucking lost, bro_.

You feel like you can almost hear his digital sighing in the pause that follows.

> You’re the crystal, Bro. It’s you.

Your eyebrows are doing a thing. An incredulous thing.

You’re so lost right now. You’re starting to wonder which one of you is supposed to be high.

> The Heart aspect has to with the splintered self. Pieces of you.  
> Me, for example.  
> You following?

You’re following. You don’t like how that sounds, though.

> You splinter and produce fragmented duplicates of yourself. Now, I’m not the same, but there’s a demonstrable similarity.

You suppose he’s about to tell you what that similarity is, then.

> We produce the same frequency.

_But-_

> Minerals are not the only piezoelectric materials. Bones are piezoelectric, too. Tendons. Enamel. That shit.  
> But I don’t have those, so who the fuck knows what our deal is. Piezoelectric materials, how do they work.

You’re almost too engrossed to overlook being repulsed by that massively overused reference.

> The long and short of it is that we produce the same unique frequency. Big chief Roxalonde helped me map it out.

_Map it out?_

You’re treading dangerously close to freaked-the-fuck-out territory.

> Yeah.

You’re afraid to ask.

> You remember that server I found. The one that doesn’t exist anywhere?

You remember.

> I found it because I’d apparently already accessed it.

You fidget your way over to your computer chair and sit because that _doesn’t make any sense_.

> I guess the frequency carries over to other aspects. Your memories, my IP, the like. Think of it like cellphones on airplanes. We’re all operating on the same wavelength, so we interfere with each other.

All.

He said all.

You thought it was just the two of you.

> This is where it gets weird.

You’re pretty sure it was already weird.

You pace over to your room and look in.

John’s still sleeping.

> Sit down, dude.

You do.

> There was plenty of activity on that server, Bro. Activity that should’ve been mine.  
> I tracked it back and only a fragment of it corresponds to this location. It’s not mine.  
> Whoever my counterpart is, he’s mobile.

You have no idea how to feel about this.

> But that’s the thing.  
> The signal both corresponds and doesn’t.

You wait.

> I think there’s another Earth.  
> Jade said this is a reboot of one of two sessions.  
> I think the other session still exists.  
> And I think it exists as a different universe, but within the same space as us.  
> Like running a program in two instances.

And then the server is unrelated, so both sessions can access it.

You understand, but it makes you hella uneasy.

> That’s not all.

It never fucking is.

> Somebody else has been accessing the server. Somebody not on Earth.  
> I think they’re trying to make contact.

Aliens. Exactly what you needed in your life.

“Is that even possible?”

You didn’t realize how quiet the apartment was. Your voice sounds too heavy, like you’re going to lose your words all over the floor.

> It’s a different program, but I can synchronize it to Pesterchum. Want me to?

The kid sleeping in your bed racks up frequent flier miles without the assistance of an airplane.

You think you can handle this.

> Just give me a second.

Your computer screen blazes into life.

D# logs you into Pesterchum with an offhand reminder about Rose, like you’d forget.

The new window pops up almost at the same moment that a new user is added to your chumroll.

grimAuxiliatrix [GA] began trolling gameBro [GB]

GA: Are You Human  
GA: I Hope You Can Forgive The Abruptness Of My Inquiry  
GA: But I Must Know Immediately  
GA: If You Are  
GA: Have You Made The Acquaintance Of A Rose Lalonde


End file.
